“People aren't just ants rushing around over a crust of bread. Every life, no matter how isolated, touches hundreds of others. It's up to us to decide if those micro connections are positive or nega...”

“The worst wounds, the deadliest of them, aren't the ones people see on the outside. They're the ones that make us bleed internally.”

“Trust the Simi. She ain't never wrong.”

“Nick rubbed his hand across his face as he tried to make sense of her prattle. But that was the thing about Simi. She seldom made sense.”

“The best consolation in misfortune or affliction of any kind will be the thought of other people who are in a still worse plight than yourself; and this is a form of consolation open to every one. ...”

“From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back.”

“This city belongs to ghosts, to murderers, to sleepwalkers. Where are you, in what bed, in what dream?”

“You cannot give out one frequency, that of disrespect, and expect respect to flow toward you. Neither can you hold on to your biases, prejudices, and negative thinking toward something, and expect ...”

“You have had many successes, and you have earned the right to be respected.”

“Better to have the trust of the people than their respect. With trust, their respect could be earned later; without it, respect could never be deserved, and so to have it would be like poison.”

“Though there had yet to be a victor in this great war that had begun almost three years ago, Maurice had written to her that they had, all of them, on all sides, lost their freedom. Freedom to thin...”

“Then I thought, boy, isn't that just typical? You wait and wait and wait for something, and then when it happens, you feel sad.”

“I'm living under water. Everything seems slow and far away. I know there's a world up there, a sunlit quick world where time runs like dry sand through an hourglass, but down here, where I am, air ...”