The doctor wagged a finger at her. "You should be grateful your surgeons took such care."
"I'm sure I'll feel much more grateful when I find a guy who thinks complex wiring in a girl is a turn-on."

I am not a story, Mr Foe. I may impress you as a story because I began my account of myself without preamble, slipping overboard into the water and striking out for the shore. But my life did not begin in the waves. (...) All of which makes up a story I do not choose to tell. I choose not to tell it because to no one, not even to you, do I owe proof that I am a substantial being with a substantial history in the world. I choose not to tell of the island (...) for I am a free woman who asserts her freedom by telling her story according to her own desire.

After a certain age men often treat their mothers as if they were small children and they are wrong. Mothers, literate and illiterate, can take everything.

The other day Andrea asked me how we first met - you and I. And I told her. Now I want to tell you. We can change it, if you like. The past is the one thing we are not prisoners of. We can do with the past exactly what we wish. What we can't do is to change its consequences. Let's make the past together.

We cannot shrink in disgust from our neighbour's touch because his hands, that are clean now, were once dirty.

In that second she saw that she could bear anything, but only if no one knew that she had anything to bear.

For the first time she suffered and rebelled because she was unable to disregard the burden of race. It was, she cried silently, enough to suffer as a woman, an individual, on one's own account, without having to suffer for the race as well. It was a brutality, and undeserved.

So many things were testing his faith. There was the Bible, of course, but the Bible was a book, and so were Black House, Treasure Island, Ethan Frome and The Last of the Mohicans. Did it indeed seem probable, as he had once overheard Dunbar ask, that the answers to the riddles of creation would be supplied by people too ignorant to understand the mechanics of rainfall?

Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.

"(...) A little grease is what makes this world go round. One hand washes the other. Know what I mean? You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours."
Yossarian knew what he meant.
"That's not what I meant," Doc Daneeka said, as Yossarian began scratching his back.

He remembered - and it was his only clear memory of the whole day - sitting between his mother and father, wondering how come both he and Ben had died, but only Ben had a casket.

"(...) Power resides where men believe it resides. No more and no less."
"So power is a mummer's trick?"
"A shadow on the wall," Varys murmured, "yet shadows can kill. And ofttimes a very small man can cast a very large shadow."

I am only a little bird, repeating the words they taught me.

"I don't want to screw you. I just love you. When did who you want to screw become the whole game? Since when is the person you want to screw the only person you get to love? [...] People act like [sex] is the most important thing humans do, but come on. How can our sentient fucking lives revolve around something slugs can do. I mean, who you want to screw and whether you screw them? Those are important questions, I guess. But they're not that important. You know what's important? Who would you die for? Who do you wake up at five forty-five in the morning for even though you don't even know why he needs you? Whose drunken nose would you pick?!"

"Come on, girl. Don't cry," whispered Frank.
"Why not? I can be miserable if I want to. You don't need to try and make it go away. It shouldn't go away. It's just as sad as it ought to be and I'm not going to hide from what's true just because it hurts."

But he hadn't lost his mind. To the contrary, he'd lost everything but. His memory, his wife, his job, his friends, twenty-four years of his life - but not his mind. That was all that had been left and he'd retreated into it because there was nowhere else.

But how can one regret what, to the mind, has never existed? Even loss is an inaccurate description, for what loss is without the awareness of losing?

You like someone who can't like you back because unrequited love can be survived in a way that once-requited love cannot.

It is unreasonable to expect a person to remember what she didn't know had happened.

In the year she knew him, before they were married, she discovered a little magic in herself, and for a while felt like a blithe genie released from her lamp. She was perhaps too young to realize that what she assumed was her love for Chacko was actually a tentative, timorous acceptance of herself.