“We were still on the whale road, in the wind that keened and thrummed the ropes.”

“So it was that my most impressionable years of boyhood were spent gazing at not a whale, but a whale's penis. Whenever I tired of strolling through the chill aisles of the aquarium, I'd steal off to my place on the bench of the high-ceilinged stillness of the exhibition room and spend hours on end there contemplating this whale's penis.”

“I danced along a colored wind/Dangled from a rope of sand”

“When she talks to Tripp, something nice happens inside of her: a vibration, a thrum. It's as if a tiny wind chime is suspended inside her soul, she thinks, and his words are the wind that makes it ring.”

“And they were quiet but their blood and nerves and butterflies were not—they were rampantly alive, rushing and thrumming in a wild and perfect melody, matched note for note.”

“If we were still English we'd be drinking more and driving on the wrong side of the road - pretty much what people do on the Fourth of July anyway.”