War is unnatural, it causes people to act unnaturally.

Nothing, she now knew, could be defined in exclusion, and every bug, pencil, and grass blade was a dictionary in itself, requiring the definitions of all things to fulfill its own.

Anytime I can get either of them really laughing, I immediately pull out a pad of paper write the joke down, regardless of where we are or what we're doing. I must be absolutely insufferable.

She was fluent in four languages and yet her fists against the rusted hood were the fullest articulation of her defeat.

Her father was the face of her morning and night, he was everything, so saturating Havaa’s world that she could no more describe him than she could the air.

Life: a constellation of vital phenomena—organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.

Invader and invaded held on to their fistfuls of earth, but in the end, the earth outlived the hands that held it.