“The winner of the game is the one with all the names.”

“You don’t let your feelings run around and jump into someone else’s hand.” Mercury made a fist. “You grab on to your own life and push it around where you want it to go.”Mercury believed she had her life firmly in place beneath her tongue, and she didn’t spit it out here and there, in bits and pieces diffusing its power. She had even taken a new name, changing it from Anna to Mercury after er granddaughter brought home a copy of the periodic table in the eighth grade and explained it to her: “An element is a substance that can’t be broken down into simpler substances.”“That’s my story,” Mercury told Charlene. running her thick forefinger across the chart. “I’m all of a piece.”Charlene opened her mouth to object, to explain that her grandmother could never be one of the chemical elements, assigned an atomic number and measured for atomic weight, but Mercury presided over the kitchen like a force of nature. Charlene’s words were snatched from her mind before they ever made it to her vocal chords. She imagined they were pulled into the woman’s energy field, the electric air surrounding Mercury’s body like her own personal atmosphere.”

“A permanent dull ache spread from my belly to my chest. I thought I could feel pinpricks of loneliness in the pads of my fingers, taste it in the back of my mouth. Clara Miller must have been lonely too, longing to be touched. One day as she sat before her metal tub filled to the rim with sweet corn, she reached behind her head and unpinned her silver hair. It tumbled down her back like creamy lace cloak. She hiked her skirts to her knees and I could see she had removed her stockings. Her legs were heavy and milk white, solid as columns. She hiked her skirts higher, until they bunched in her lap.When I kissed the back of her neck she quivered, like the dying peasant I’d shot and killed a week before. Her silver hair smelled like smoke. Clara and I tangled together like the bale of wire resting beside the unrepaired chicken coop. We were shameless, falling to the ground, wading into the creek, making our way to her bed.”

“Shane: Note to self: Never ever doubt Cam.”

“To the DEW line Commander"You will be the first to die (if Russia launches) but I'd like for you to tell me when you die”

“If you want to make your dreams come true, the first thing you have to do is wake up.”

“Everyone ate as a group, and a huge cauldron of dumpster-dived gruel bubbled over a campfire, tended by a grubby-handed group of chefs dicing potatoes and onions on a piece of cardboard on the ground. Huck [Finn] may have been right that a 'barrel of odds and ends' where the 'juice kind of swaps around' makes for better victuals, but it occurred to me that the revolution may well get dysentery.”