”What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”

“I could think of no better place to secretly murder someone than inside a fridge. Well, actually there were probably several better ones, but none came to mind at the time.”

Osla sometimes wondered how many women there were in Britain like her, lying to their families all day, every day, about what they’d done in the war. Never once saying the words I may just be a housewife now, but I used to break German ciphers in Hut 6 or I may look like a brainless socialite, but I translated naval orders in Hut 4.

Of course, a good university didn’t mean a good man.

On the first day of class, Frieda had warned all the millinery hopefuls that hats were not a growing industry—its heyday had long passed; in America, only eccentrics and religious women wore them.

"I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life."

"What, you egg?"

[He stabs him.]

“They’re like your Orthodox priests, aren’t they, your women? Beautiful in their obstinacy.”

“He was. A great man, but maddening. Most great men are. The way he went through tobacco and pens. . . and dear me, the water bill for all those hot baths when he was working through some problems!”

"I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine."

"But in time it became clear that Chung Mee, Tiny, and the others were not as smart, not as clever, not as handsome, not as wise as Tikki Tikki Tembo-no Sa Rembo-chari Bari Ruchi-pip Peri Pembo!"

He thought that Shigeru had a childlike way of looking at the world and this was what Nintendo needed.

How heavy, / the baggage that I carried / at departure.

“You can't stop a soldier from being frightened but you can give him motivation to help him overcome that fear. I have no such motivation. I can't have. I'm a witcher: an artificially created mutant. I kill monsters for money. I defend children when their parents pay me to. If Nilfgaardian parents pay me, I'll defend Nilfgaardian children. And even if the world lies in ruin - which does not seem likely to me - I'll carry on killing monsters in the ruins of this world until some monster kills me. That is my fate, my reason, my life and my attitude to the world. And it is not what I chose. It was chosen for me.”

“I'm seventeen and I'm crazy. My uncle says the two always go together. When people ask your age, he said, always say seventeen and insane.”

Such a fuss over a broken alarm. Housewives sure must be starved for conversation, her husband said in bewilderment. That’s just it, the woman answered with a laugh.

"Everybody out here already knows there's only so many versions of the same twisted man. You see him in every vacant lot and doorway, every town and city. Just blink and there he is, out here on the hunt. Offering you a ride around the corner, same seat Mommy sits in. Ain't that great?" She told Naum.

The Fathers say you can listen a soul into existence.

Then she said, "I don't knit or sew, with yarn or thread, but maybe Im creative, like them. I knit my thoughts together on paper. I have a rule, from when I was little. Every day I write some-thing. Something about the people who come in and out of my life and about the things that happen. Someday I'm gonna sew them all together in a book. And Father, I do remember who I am, and where I'm from, and I do know what you mean by that. You're not talking about the old neighborhood or the old country, things like that that fade away. That's not where we're going, ultimately. It's just sometimes I forget, or maybe you're right, maybe it is too much stuff, stuff around us makes it hard to keep it in mind."

"Always been something out here trying to make you forget who you really are, your true self. Where you're really from. And where you're really going, ya know, ultimately, I mean. I think we forget all that. Maybe we've been distracted by how much stuff we have, the stuff that becomes stuff we have to deal with."

"How much we have." She almost laughed but stopped herself out of pity for the priest.

He wasn't sure Elisa understood, but he knew he had to find a kind, non-accusatory way to plant the seed of her deeper remembering.

When the grizzly cubs were caught, collared, and taken away—
relocated they call it—
their mother ran back and forth on the road screaming.
Brutal sound. Torn from her lungs. Her heart,
twisted knot, hot blood rivering
to the twenty-six pounding bones of her feet...

...They were breathing what looked like gladness.
But that other mother . . .
Her massive head raised, desperate to catch their scent.
Each footfall a fracture in the earth’s crust.