“in the absence of real power blood seemed the only alternative.though he could walk away, and had to walk away, he could not walk away with impunity. he could never be a mordantly amused or merely interested observer of the beast.”

“They were always walking away from him. But he never seemed able to walk away from them.”

“she stuck a bookmark in my heart and walked away”

“Don't worry about me babe. I've seen so many backs walking away from me that this is old hat," he said, shrugging like this wasn't killing him like it was me. "Say it," he said, his voice shaking.”

“He simply felt that if he could carry away the vision of the spot of earth she walked on, and the way the sky and sea enclosed it, the rest of the world might seem less empty.”

“He walked close enough to hold hands and far enough away that words could never repair the damage we'd done to each other.”

“It came to him that he had turned away from the buffalo not because of a womanish nausea at blood and stench and spilling gut; it came to him that he had sickened and turned away because of his shock at seeing the buffalo, a few moments before proud and noble and full of the dignity of life, now stark and helpless, a length of inert meat, divested of itself, or his notion of its self, swinging grotesquely, mockingly, before him. It was not itself; or it was not that self that he had imagined it to be. That self was murdered; and in that murder he had felt the destruction of something within him, and he had not been able to face it. So he had turned away.”