“... learning the knack of disconnecting her sense of smell, until she could switch it off like a radio and in the bland silence of its absence could drown in the sound of Nazarébaddoor’s hypnotic voice without having her reverie interrupted by the scent of sheep shit or Nazarébaddoor’s own frequent and extraordinary buffalo farts.”

“She could smell the sea in the air, but more than that, she could smell the scent of the grass as it awoke from its winter slumber. She could hear the sound of crickets as they sang to the emerging stars. It was springtime on the North Island. It was springtime for the world.”

“In architecture, space was a material to be shaped, even created. For these men, the material was silence. Silence like water in which you could drown, the absence of talk as constricting as the absence of air.”

“She could smell the boy spice beneath the thrift-store aroma of his jacket, and the rubbing and the smell began to work to soften her -- like butter before you add sugar, in the first steps of making something sweet. It was her first experience of how bodies could meld together, how breath could slip naturally into rhythm. It was hypnotic. Heady. And she wanted more.”

“[T.J.] If she had gotten sick, the only thing I could have done was watch her suffer. Bury her next to Mick when she died. I didn’t know if I could make it without her. The sound of her voice, her smile, her– those were the things that made living on the island bearable. I held her a little tighter and thought if she woke up I might tell her that. She didn’t though. She sighed in her sleep, and eventually I drifted off.”

“It's a dungeon, Leila. They're Supposed to smell."Mission accomplished. The stench might have actually killed my new appetite. If hell could fart, it would smell like this.”