"He thought families were like a poison in your blood."
CHANCE
"Her professors were delighted with her - they were grateful these days for anybody who took up ancient languages, and particularly for someone so gifted - but they were worried, as well. The problem was that she was a girl."
"Be available, be friendly (especially if you are not popular) - that was what you learned in a small town and also in a girls' dormitory. Be accommodating to anybody who wants to suck you dry, even if they know nothing about who you are."
"Every few pages she seemed to have had an orgy of underlining."
"It often happened when somebody really valuable got into bad trouble, they were changed into a constellation."
"The thing that was your bright pleasure. You don't think about it. A loss you could not contemplate at one time, and now it becomes something you can barely remember. That is what happens. And even if it's not put away, even if you make your living from it, every day? Juliet thinks of the older teachers at the school, how little most of them care for whatever it is that they teach. Take Juanita, who chose Spanish because it goes with her Christian name (she is Irish) and who wants to speak it well, to use it in her travels. You cannot say that Spanish is her treasure. Few people, very few, have a treasure, and if you do you must hang on to it. You must not let yourself be waylaid, and have it taken from you."
SILENCE
"Without exactly meaning to, she lost contact with most of her friends. It was no wonder. She lived now a life as different as possible from the life of the public, vivacious, concerned, endlessly well-informed woman that she had been. She lived amongst books, reading through most of her waking hours and being compelled to deepen, to alter, whatever premise she had started with. She often missed the world news for a week at a time."
PASSION
"She could not explain or quite understand that it wasn't altogether jealousy she felt, it was rage. And not because she couldn't stop like that or dress like that. It was because that was what girls were supposed to be like. That was what men - people, everybody - thought they should be like. Beautiful, treasured, spoiled, selfish, pea-brained. That was what a girl should be, to be fallen in love with. Then she would become a mother and she'd be all mushily devoted to her babies. Not selfish anymore, but just as pea-brained. Forever."
TRESPASSES
"The thing about life, Harry had told Lauren, was to live in the world with interest. To keep your eyes open and see the possibilities - see the humanity - in everybody you met. To be aware. If he has anything at all to teach her it was that. Be aware."
"Her isolation at school was based on knowledge and experience, which, as she half knew, coul look like innocence and priggishness. The things that were wicked mysteries to others were not so to her and she did not know how to pretend about them. And that was what separated her, just as much as knowing how to pronounce L'Anse aux Meadows and having read The Lord of the Rings."
TRICKS
"Foreigners talked differently, leaving a bit of space around the words, the way actors do."
"Twins are often the reason for mix-ups and disasters in Shakespeare. A means to an end, those tricks are supposed to be."
Runaway - Alice Munro
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