“Rome remained great as long as she had enemies who forced her to unity, vision, and heroism. When she had overcome them all she flourished for a moment and then began to die.”

“Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.”

“she had never known who she was at all, except sometimes for a moment in meditation, when her I am became It is, and she breathed the stars”

“She wanted to die. She wanted to die. Because then it would be over. All the loss, all the grief, all the pain, the emptiness - over. And she had said nothing then. Nothing. Nor had she crawled into her room and swallowed her mother’s pills, or crawled into her bath and opened up her own wrists. As if death were somehow personal. As if death were somehow an enemy that could be faced and stared down, she would not give it the satisfaction of seeing how badly it had hurt her. Again.”

“She lay on her back in bed for a long time thinking and when she returned to school an hour early she was beyond all desire to cry and she had sharpened her sense of smell along with her claws so that she could track down the miserable whore who had ruined her life.”

“But when they couldn’t find Lockie she had to slip back into mother mode. There were days when mother mode pulled her in kicking and screaming. That moment, just for one moment, she had wanted to remain separate. Just herself, whole and untethered.”