Lambhood and tigerishness may be found in either gender, and in the same individual at different times.

Stick a shovel in the ground almost anywhere and some horrible thing or other will come to light.

She stubs out her cigarette in the brown glass ashtray, then settles herself against him, ear to his chest. She likes to hear his voice this way, as if it begins not in his throat but in his body, like a hum or a growl, or like a voice speaking from deep underground. Like the blood moving through her own heart: a word, a word, a word.

She’s the kind of woman who wants what she doesn’t have and gets what she wants and then despises what she gets.

The ancestral voices were prophesying war because ancestral voices never shut up, and they hate to be wrong, and war is a sure thing, sooner or later.

Mitch looks in her direction. He can't meet her eyes. It's as if she's semi-invisible, a kind of hovering blur.