Buck, Joan Juliet:

"Paris," she said, "slows time while accelerating growth. Everything rots in Paris, especially Americans."
(Daughter of the Swan)

He had a deep voice with various tones to it, and he'd stand at the bottom of the stairs and shout, "Julia!" and the air in the house would be a little damaged until the boom had died away.
(Daughter of the Swan)

I thought about the metal and the glass that had killed her. I said metal and I said glass. Behind the words, and in front, was the crushing empty space, a sky of boulders.
(Daughter of the Swan)

The only ethical condition I attached to my behavior was that I would not touch any man married to any girl I knew. I proceeded therefore a little like the knight on the chessboard, soliciting and responding always two away and diagonally across from where I sat. I was fond of men at other tables.
(Daughter of the Swan)

Sylvie and I had to go to sit in the Flore after lunch. We had not yet been seen that day, and we needed to be looked at while we talked.
(Daughter of the Swan)

She went on: "You see, I love Marc, I really love him. And I want to marry him."
"But you have everything to live for!" I said.
(Daughter of the Swan)

My father's lessons in taste had left me with a disdain for art that used shorthand sentiment: sunsets, dawns, birds, children, rainbows. He liked the beautiful only if it was in a dead, unknown, or forgotten language. He couldn't bear to read the words Joy, or Beauty, or Sorrow, or Happiness, or Soul, or God, and snickered at anyone who used them.
(Daughter of the Swan)

Now I was forced to do some formal thinking. Good, bad, happy, sad. The notions came in cubes that fell like dice.
(Daughter of the Swan)

If I couldn't be happy, I would have to be rich. Madame Ambelic always said it was better to cry in a Rolls-Royce than in the métro.
(Daughter of the Swan)

"Will it last?" I asked.
"Nothing ever ends," she said.
(Daughter of the Swan)

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