Lily King

“Go. Go to your beautiful dances, your beautiful ceremonies. And we will bury our dead.”

“The impulse to touch her and all the life in her was something I had to check regularly.”

“He smelled of cigarettes and whiskey, the smell of Cambridge and youth.”

“You don't realize how language actually interferes with communication until you don't have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense. You have to pay much more attention to everything else when you can't understand the words. Once comprehension comes, so much else falls away. You then rely on their words, and words aren't always the most reliable thing.”

“There is something about finding the balance to one's nature - perhaps a culture that flourishes is a culture that has found a similar balance among its people.”

“I asked her if she believed you could ever truly understand another culture. I told her the longer I stayed, the more asinine the attempt seemed, and that what I’d become more interested in is how we believed we could be objective in any way at all, we who each came in with our own personal definitions of kindness, strength, masculinity, femininity, God, civilisation, right and wrong.”

“You don’t realise how language actually interferes with communication until you don’t have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense.”

“Sometimes you just find a culture that breaks your heart,” she said finally.”

“I felt in some ways we'd had some sort of sex, sex of the mind, sex of ideas, sex of words, hundreds and thousands of words...”

“You don't struggle with these questions?""No. But I've always thought my opinion was the right one. It's a small flaw I have.""An American flaw.”

“Is it always that way with men, that first burst of love or sex the thing that binds you? Do you always have to harken back to those first weeks when just the way he walked across a room made you want to take off all your clothes?”