"I loved the idea that you stripped the sheets off the beds and made dresses out of them. It has something of the Marquis de Sade."

"the fate of Achilles, “death-devoted, already dead,”

"And I’m not one to play the dirty little game of counting corpses."

"its windows (it's really all windows) started popping out and crashing to the street below"

"sought to resurrect plants from their ashes"

reading course descriptions, I find

"Methods to deliver molecules to the human body," in the description of a course.

and "Tissue Engineering,"
because human knowledge seems to me so fascinatingly remote from what I could know on my own.

poetry an outsider finds in things she can half-glean only

"Barking Irons - the name is 19th-century slang for pistols"

"Better yet, don’t think at all. Either way, you will have the chance again tonight."

"Similarly endearing are his robot-animals, with spotlights for muzzles, long antennas, wheels and rotating bases."

“We’re looking for the river of butterflies, not just the stream.”

"the usually exquisite balance of nature," I'm a mottephobe