“Look, ladies, we've been over this. I don't even remember killing Medusa. I don't remember anything! Can't we just call a truce and talk about your weekly specials?" Stheno gave her sister a pouty look, which was hard to do with giant bronze tusks. "Can we?”

“I don't really know them, but I know this: they're just like your kids were. Or are. Sweet, trusting, good in ways we adults hardly even remember. We have to look out for them. Not because of the tattoos, or in spite of them, but because they're kids and we're supposed to look out for kids.”

“There was a Princess Somebody of Denmark sitting at a table with a number of people around her, and I saw an empty chair at their table and sat down.She turned to me and said, "Oh! You're one of the Nobel-Prize-winners. In what field did you do your work?""In physics," I said."Oh. Well, nobody knows anything about that, so I guess we can't talk about it.""On the contrary," I answered. "It's because somebody knows something about it that we can't talk about physics. It's the things that nobody knows anything about that we can discuss. We can talk about the weather; we can talk about social problems; we can talk about psychology; we can talk about international finance--gold transfers we can't talk about, because those are understood--so it's the subject that nobody knows anything about that we can all talk about!"I don't know how they do it. There's a way of forming ice on the surface of the face, and she did it!”

“There are some things I guess we bury so we can get on with living. I don't think it's wrong, necessarily, just what we do to survive. It's the remembering part that's hard. Some people remember and some never have to. The blessed and the cursed.”

“Heroes!" Euryale said with disgust. "They always bring that up, just like our mother! 'why can't you turn people to stone? your sister can turn people to stone.' Well, I'm sorry to disappoint you, boy! That was Medusa's curse alone. she was the most hideous one in the family. She got all the luck!" Stheno looked hurt. "Mother said I was the most hideous.”

“Republicans don't like people to talk about depressions. You can hardly blame them for that. You remember the old saying: Don't talk about rope in the house where somebody has been hanged.”