No self-respecting feminist could argue with the claim that the novel is more likely to accept existing power structures than not. But there's a vast difference, surely, between Dickens saying Indians should be exterminated and a Dave Eggers writing eloquently about the NSA, but not being as outspoken on American military power abroad.

How do you eat your roots?

How horrifying that morning when you wake up and your first thought is not of the person who has left. That’s when you know, I will never die of a broken heart.

How to explain to the earth that it was more functional as a vegetable patch than a flower garden, just as factories were more functional than schools and boys were more functional as weapons than as humans.

So many things you promise yourself you won't get used to, and then you do.

Love is like an eternal flame, once it is lit, it will continue to burn for all time.

Her definition of romance was absentminded intimacy, the way someone else's hand stray to your plate of food. I replied: no, that's just friendship; romance is always knowing exactly where that someone else's hands are. She smiled and said, there was a time I thought that way, too. But at the heart of the romance is the knowledge that those hands may wander off elsewhere, but somehow through luck or destiny or plain blind groping they'll find a way back to you, and maybe you'll be smart enough then to be grateful for everything that's still possible, in spit of your own weaknesses- and his.