“Shane: Note to self: Never ever doubt Cam.”

“You don’t let your feelings run around and jump into someone else’s hand.” Mercury made a fist. “You grab on to your own life and push it around where you want it to go.”Mercury believed she had her life firmly in place beneath her tongue, and she didn’t spit it out here and there, in bits and pieces diffusing its power. She had even taken a new name, changing it from Anna to Mercury after er granddaughter brought home a copy of the periodic table in the eighth grade and explained it to her: “An element is a substance that can’t be broken down into simpler substances.”“That’s my story,” Mercury told Charlene. running her thick forefinger across the chart. “I’m all of a piece.”Charlene opened her mouth to object, to explain that her grandmother could never be one of the chemical elements, assigned an atomic number and measured for atomic weight, but Mercury presided over the kitchen like a force of nature. Charlene’s words were snatched from her mind before they ever made it to her vocal chords. She imagined they were pulled into the woman’s energy field, the electric air surrounding Mercury’s body like her own personal atmosphere.”

“The winner of the game is the one with all the names.”

“To the DEW line Commander"You will be the first to die (if Russia launches) but I'd like for you to tell me when you die”

“If you want to make your dreams come true, the first thing you have to do is wake up.”

“Everyone ate as a group, and a huge cauldron of dumpster-dived gruel bubbled over a campfire, tended by a grubby-handed group of chefs dicing potatoes and onions on a piece of cardboard on the ground. Huck [Finn] may have been right that a 'barrel of odds and ends' where the 'juice kind of swaps around' makes for better victuals, but it occurred to me that the revolution may well get dysentery.”

“for the disproportionate fear that the statistically and historically minimal group of women who were both angry and had hairy legs have inculcated both in their detractors and in their wannabe-successors, we should salute them as often as possible”