"How could she explain that this city was a graveyard? That they were walking ever day though streets where there had been a holocaust, a mass murder of neglect and antipathy, that when they stepped through a pocket of cold air, didn't they understand it was a ghost, it was a boy the world had spat out?"
"The nurse came in, and she showed Yale a small pink sponge on the ends of a stick, showed him how he could hold it to Charlie's lips to give him water
He fed him water, drop by drop.
He could feel it, all around him: how down the corridor, and down other hallways of other hospitals around Chicago and the other godforsaken cities of the globe, a thousand other men did the same."
"She thought of Nora, whose art and love were interrupted by assassination and war. Stupid men and their stupid violence, tearing apart everything good that was ever built. Why couldn't you ever just go after your life without tripping over some idiot's dick?"