"Realizations can come, Zoe, even to a selfishness as great as mine has been."
"Sacrifice is not always beautiful. It can be silly and futile."
"Zoe!"
"Yes, and bring rewards to neither side. Half the people who are sacrificed for become tearful tyrants, and those who do the sacrificing sour and meek, or holy with righteousness."
"You are reciting the kind of thing you hear down at Daab's."
"I'm reciting you."
"You darling boomerang!"
"I suppose now you are sorry you didn't stay at home in your canary cage to no one's particular advantage and your own terrific disadvantage. Now that you have reared me into the kind of human being you set out to be, you renig. Do you want to throw me back into that bowl with the greased sides that you managed to climb out of? Not much."
This from Zoe, mixed metaphor and all, who at seventeen kept Doll's House, Freud, Anna Karenina, and Ellen Key on the table beside her bed.
"Theories go down, Zoe, before life—and death."