Her father once told her casually that she was built like a plum on toothpicks, and the phrase was at once so cruel and so poetic that it clicked into place around her like a harness.

seems to me it may have resulted in some absence of yearning or striving in us. The quest, I like to call it. When one’s parents or grandparents have already quested and conquered, what is there for subsequent generations to do?”

She sometimes felt that her entire life was either following orders from those above her in station, or giving them to those below her.

To be a human is complex, and often painful; to be an animal is comfortingly simple and good.

the phrase was at once so cruel and so poetic that it clicked into place around her like a harness.

I hope you’re getting what you want from this life, too.”

Rich people, thought Judy—she thought this then, and she thinks it now—generally become most enraged when they sense they’re about to be held accountable for their wrongs.

Politeness, they believed, was only to be directed at those who ranked lower than you, who served you in some way.

But nobody asked her, and so she kept these wishes quiet, writing them only in journals, summoning them to the forefront of her mind whenever a birthday or a well or a star presented her with a formal opportunity to make them known to the universe.