“I think it was the institution...I was trying to master it.”

“You have some balls."Frankie hated that expression, ever since Zada had pointed out to her that it equates courage with the male equipment...”

“I can feel like a hag some days if I want! And I can tell everybody how insecure I am if I want! Or I can be pretty and pretend to think I'm a hag out of fake modesty - I can do that if I want, too...”

“So she did not replay, but played the strategist. She retained more power by withholding an answer.”

“She will not be simple and sweet.She will not be what people tell her she should be.”

“Don't worry,' she told him. 'I am exceptionally good at keeping secrets.'- Frankie Landau-Banks”

“We are looking for a tongue that speaks with reverence for life, searching for an ecology of mind. Without it, we have no home, no place of our own within the creation. It is not only the vocabular...”

“But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.”

“Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe wh...”

“All words are pegs to hang ideas on.”

“A word is not the same with one writer as it is with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.”

“No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake....”