“It taught that there are three versions of things: the one I see in my mind, and the one that carries onto the paper, and then what it ultimately becomes.”

“She's been conned, ruined, left for dead, and she's not going to forgive any of it. She will soldier on, if only out of spite.”

“I don't dare touch her. Loss is a knowledge I'm sorry to have. Perhaps the only thing worse than experiencing it, is watching it replay anew in someone else--all the awful stages picking up like a ...”

“There is a silence so great that I can hear the ice crystals cracking and falling from eyelashes of girls who will never blink again.”

“We were his disposable things. Brought to him like cattle. Stripped of what made us sisters or daughters or children. There was nothing that he could take from usour genes, our bones, our wombsthat...”

“He looks at me, and I don't know what he sees. I used to think it was Rose. But she's not here with us now, in this room. It's just him and me, and the books. I feel like our lives are in those boo...”

“I envy people that know love. That have someone who takes them as they are.”

“Souls are flowers, only God has the right to pluck them. But those who commit suicide: their souls are the rotten blossoms of devil's garden.”

“We live in a dark and romantic and quite tragic world.”

“Prostitution has the same relationship to trafficking as sex has to rape. One is voluntary, the other is not”

“The man at the end of the bar was looking at me. ... Should I get drunk and sleep with him now? But I could see that I would regret that so much I would want to die after. I didn't want to get invo...”

“She didn't look like any motel manager I had ever seen. More likely an actress who hadn't quite made the grade down south, or a very successful amateur tart on the verge of turning pro. Whatever he...”

“Though there had yet to be a victor in this great war that had begun almost three years ago, Maurice had written to her that they had, all of them, on all sides, lost their freedom. Freedom to thin...”

“Then I thought, boy, isn't that just typical? You wait and wait and wait for something, and then when it happens, you feel sad.”

“I'm living under water. Everything seems slow and far away. I know there's a world up there, a sunlit quick world where time runs like dry sand through an hourglass, but down here, where I am, air ...”