“Saigon was loved precisely because it was so unlovable - its squalor, its biblical, Job-like misfortune, its imminent, hoevering doom.”

“Helen's Saigon had always been about selling - chickens, information, or lovely young women, it didn't matter. It had once been called the Pearl of the Orient, but by people who had not been there in a very long time. Saigon had never been Paris, but now it was a garrison town, unlovely, a stinking refugee shantyville filled with the angry, the betrayed, the dispossessed, but she had made it her home, and she couldn't bear that soon she would have to leave.”

“Saigon in utter darkness this last night of the war. A gestating monster. Her letter to Linh had been simple: I love you more than life, but I had to see the end.”

“Once a picture was taken, the experience was purged of its power to haunt.”

“Why did someone fall in love with you because you are one thing and then want you to be something else?”

“The only tangible evidence of the enemy's existence so far was dead bodies, but strangely, the dead were somehow less, did not match the fear and terror they inspired, much like one could not imagine flight from the evidence of a dead bird on the ground.”

“She had broken, become something else. She didn't know what yet. Could you love someone in the process of changing? She did love Linh. As much as a ghost loved. The mind treacherous.”