Nothing More Than an Ordinary Part of Life

　　The Valium helped, but it still seemed to be an eternity before they arrived in Goa and the bus ride came to an end. Lor realized that the fact that she was in such psychological distress from a simple nine hours of discomfort —— not even pain, just discomfort —— was a sign of how different she was from the Indians around her, who accepted this trial as nothing more than an ordinary part of life. All of the Indians were laughing and excited as they exited the bus, stretching their limbs joyfully, ready for a day of touring in sunny Goa. Arman, even, had taken it a bit better than she had, and it made her understand more fully how much one is changed by war. Lor, of course, had never fought in a war. She had never even run an obstacle course. The most that she had done, really, was birth a child —— even that she had done with an epidural and, in the end, while unconscious.

　　It made her think that all of Arman’s talk about fat-fuck Americans being somehow unworthy of their status as world megapower was more justified than she had first thought.

The Girls from Corona del Mar, P147
Rufi Thorpe
ISBN 978-0-385-35196-6

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Right Thing to Do

　　“I hate this fucking sentiment that you’re expressing. It’s a common one. The sacred child who must be cared for no matter what, no matter what the cost. You know, if this were a hundred years ago, Zach would have been left out in the woods. Because they knew —— they knew no baby deserved to suffer like that, and no mother deserved to suffer that way either. But we’ve lost that. We’ve completely lost our fucking minds, so now the ‘right thing to do’ is to make him suffer pain we wouldn’t wish on our worst enemy. That’s the civilized thing to do. To torture him to death inside his own body by refusing to let him die. He can’t even eat! What animal is kept alive past the point where it can't eat? It’s disgusting. It’s foul. I couldn’t watch it anymore. I couldn’t be part of it.”

The Girls from Corona del Mar, P134~135
Rufi Thrope
ISBN 978-0-385-35196-6

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Nomadic Thing

　　“Is a tree a nomad?” she asked, almost breathless with the beauty of this concept.

　　“I think so. Yeah, I think everything that exists would be a nomad, kind of. I don’t know. I haven’t read Leibniz in years.”

　　Lorrie just stared at him. She wanted to pick him up and shake him up and down until all of the amazing things inside of him came out, so that she could paw through all the ideas like a kid going through the fallen candy from a piñata.

　　“So with women, it seems like this nomadic thing, like the universe is actually going to change in response to the way they are changing themselves, and they are actually changing themselves by changing the way they looked at the universe. They are so much more in tune with their intuition than men, and their sense of destiny is more holistic and that demands this kind of integration, not only within society, but within themselves. They are looking to be right sized. So that they work right with all the other nomads and they are in harmony like they should be. So I guess when I said they were Luthers with vaginas, what I really means is tat they are going to take the holy book and translate it, so it isn’t in Latin anymore, but in their own tongue, and that’s going to change the nature of the book itself. Shazam!”

The Girls from Corona del Mar, P95
Rufi Thrope
ISBN 978-0-385-35196-6

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