“No. The smile had left Sarahs voice. He still works for the Basij. Beware of weak men, little sister. He never returned to help, not even to express condolences for Father. Find a strong man. Get a...”

“Being articulate is no guarantee of intelligence, Zoe said. Im not doubting the value of education. Im doubting its reach. Highly educated politicians still do stupid things. Anthony Weiner was edu...”

“Zoe stopped one last time in front of the mirror, adjusting her new American dress. She didnt see the dress, however. She saw what the big Russian did to her. She saw what al-Qaeda did to her. She ...”

“Zoe did what civilized people do when they freak out: she drank tea. She had walked from her little bungalow to Coffee & Tea. It was always filled with the well-educated, the complicated, the peopl...”

“Saul had gained his six-foot frame at sixteen, but his muscles didnt arrive until his early twenties. Between those lost years, he was a gangly, uncoordinated klutz. He was told that he could impro...”

“Zoe leaned closer to Ruth, nearly nose to nose. If they were made from better stuff, they would have pretended the fault was theirs. They would have made a moment of it--a pretty moment.”

“Perhaps a creature of so much ingenuity and deep memory is almost bound to grow alienated from his world, his fellows, and the objects around him. He suffers from a nostalgia for which there is no ...”

“Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.”

“No one at the factory can remember how long weve worked here, or how old we are, yet our pace and productivity continues to increase. It seems as if neither the company nor our temporary supervisor...”

“As regards intellectual work it remains a fact, indeed, that great decisions in the realm of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual, working ...”

“We are all alone, born alone, die alone, andin spite of True Romance magazineswe shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do no...”

“I never really understood the word loneliness. As far as I was concerned, I was in an orgy with the sky and the ocean, and with nature.”

“Saul had gained his six-foot frame at sixteen, but his muscles didnt arrive until his early twenties. Between those lost years, he was a gangly, uncoordinated klutz. He was told that he could impro...”

“Zoe leaned closer to Ruth, nearly nose to nose. If they were made from better stuff, they would have pretended the fault was theirs. They would have made a moment of it--a pretty moment.”

“Civil order mattered. Zoe didnt know why Farah continued to wear the headscarf, but most Middle-Eastern women wore modest clothing to anchor themselves to a moral order, in an upside-down world. Zo...”