“Then the queenmother said, "I am done with weeping." She whistled for the grey wolves that guarded her keep, and they loped at her heels as she rode around the Inward Sea and south to Ramas, and the way was long and hard. She knelt before her brother, King Thyrse, and begged him to lend this strength to save her son and kingdom from the lamia's stranglehold. But he bade her go hom to her northern keep, saying, "It more befits a woman to weep than to war." She rent her gown and showed under it a corset of steel, saying, "Brother, by our sire and our dame, remember the same blood runs in both our veins.”

“Sion calls Anne an eel, he calls her a slippery dipper from the slime, and he remembers what the cardinal had called her: my serpentine enemy. Sion says, she goes to it with her brother; he says, what, her brother George? ‘Any brother she's got. Those kind keep it in the family. They do filthy French tricks, like –’‘Can you keep your voice down?’ He looks around, as if spies might be swimming by the boat.‘– and that's how she trusts herself she don't give in to Henry, because if she lets him do it and she gets a boy he's, thanks very much, now clear off, girl – so she's oh, Your Highness, I never could allow – because she knows that very night her brother's inside her, licking her up to the lungs, and then he's, excuse me, sister, what shall I do with this big package – she says, oh,don't distress yourself, my lord brother, shove it up the back entry, it'll come to no harm there.”

“Nearly every morning, a certain woman in our community comes running out of her house with her face white and her overcoat flapping wildly. She cries out, "Emergency, emergency," and one of us runs to her and holds her until her fears are calmed. We know she is making it up; nothing is has really happened to her. But we understand, because there is hardly one of us who has no been moved at some time to do just what she has done, and every time, it has taken all our strength, and even the strength of our friends and families, too, to keep us quiet.”

“Part of her life was made from the tree growing rankly in the yard. She was the bitter quarrels she had with her brother whom she loved dearly. She was Katie's secret, despairing weeping. She was the shame of her father staggering home drunk”

“If she were meeting him for the first time and he looked at her like that, she would be spinning on her heel and on the run before you could say Kentucky Derby.”

“But in a way you can say that after leaving the sea, after all those millions of years of living inside of the sea, we took the ocean with us. When a woman makes a baby, she gives it water, inside her body, to grow in. That water inside her body is almost exactly the same as the water of the sea. It is salty, by just the same amount. She makes a little ocean, in her body. And not only this. Our blood and our sweating, they are both salty, almost exactly like the water from the sea is salty. We carry oceans inside of us, in our blood and our sweat. And we are crying the oceans, in our tears.”