“It was my first lesson. Beneath the smooth, familiar face of things is another that waits to tear the world in two” .

“’It is not fair,’ I said. ‘It can not be.’ / ‘Those are two different things,’ my grandmother said’” .

“It is law that guests must be fed before the host’s curiosity” .

“’If I had known I would not have done the rite.’ / She nodded. ‘You and most others. Perhaps that is why suppliants may not be questioned’” .

“All my hammering had only made her harder”.

“Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of the poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep” .

“Her only love was reason. And that has never been the same as wisdom” .

“He could not imagine the scope of the gods, the mercilessness of seeing generations rise and fall around you” .

“Yet a thousand men and women walk this world and live to be old. Some of them are even happy, mother. They do not just cling to safe harbors with desperate faces” .

“It is youth’s gift not to feel its debts” .

“Girls and boys would sigh over him, but all I saw were the thousand soft places of his body where his life might be ended. The bareness of his neck looked obscene in the firelight” 

“I cannot bear this world another moment longer. / Then, child, make another”