“I was thinking earlier that to know this city you must first become penniless, because pennilessness (real pennilessness, I mean not having $2 for the subway) forces you to walk everywhere and you ...”

“If nothing else, it's pleasant to consider the possibility. He likes the thought of ships moving over the water, toward another world just out of sight.”

“People want what was best about the world.”

“Twenty years earlier, in a life [Kirsten] mostly couldnt remember, she had had a small nonspeaking role in a short-lived Toronto production of King Lear. Now she walked in sandals whose soles had b...”

“No,' Dahlia said, 'because I think people like him think work is supposed to be drudgery punctuated by very occasional moments of happiness, but when I say happiness, I mostly mean distraction. You...”

“What she aspired to was a kind of delirious perfection. What Lilia wanted was to travel, but not only that; she wanted to be a citizen of everywhere, free-wheeling and capable of instant flight.”

“Peace always grows in a loving and compassionate mind.”

“Forgiveness is the most compassionate way toward the peace.”

“But I want you to know," Cleo continued, "that there is hope. And that I am living proof of that hope. Because, even though I was forced into this marriage against my will, I have come to know Prin...”

“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 ...”