“I gripped against her like she was metal and I was all full of lightning, charged up and jagged and of that moment alone.”

“Because even when there is no hope, somehow you can still find a place to pin inside the things that you need.”

“I felt naked beneath the wildness of her eyes. I felt alive. Unknown. And I knew then that the world contained so many things I would never understand.”

“You couldn't make up something that looked so right.”

“You take what you can get, I reckon. You take what you can get.”

“A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give.”

“Prose divides shame into stations.”

“He lifted his arm that had been resting on her shoulders and gazed at the words she had written on his hand. He had been branded as cattle are branded to show whom they belong to. The cold mountain...”