“People were made up of shit and piss and phlegm and bits and pieces of experience.”

“All innocent mechanisms are muddied up with experience. Children become less and less translucent. Layers of guile and suspicion grow. It's the law of paternal disenchantments.”

“That boy may have been born on third base but he sure as shit ain’t scored a triple.”

“Of all the conditions we experience, solitude is perhaps the most misunderstood.”

“Those partial to drink were hiding faults and dishonesty. They were sloppy souls, even the ones with pleasant manners and fine noses.”

“People went through life like well handled jugs, collecting chips and scrapes and stains from wear and tear, from holding and pouring life.”

“She did not make monsters of us. She simply gave us the power to remake ourselves into those inviolable creatures the God of Equality had intended us to be. We knew she was deconstructing the old disabled versions of our sex, and that her ruthlessness was adopted because those constructs were built to endure. She broke down the walls that had kept us contained. There was a fresh red field on the other side, and in its rich soil were growing all the flowers of war that history never let us gather. It was beautiful to walk in. As beautiful as the fells that autumn.”