“After telling the hard facts to anyone from lover to friend, I have changed in their eyes. Often it is awe or admiration, sometimes it is repulsion, once or twice it has been fury hurled directly a...”

“I forgive you," I said. I said what I had to. I would die by pieces to save myself from real death.”

“Tess was my first experience of a woman who had inhabited her weirdness, moved into the areas of herself that made her distinct from those around her, and learned how to display them proudly.”

“You could not be filled with hate and be beautiful. Like any other girl, I wanted to be beautiful. But I was filled with hate.”

“In the tunnel where I was raped, a tunnel that was once an underground entry to an amphitheater, a place where actors burst forth from underneath the seats of a crowd, a girl had been murdered and ...”

“I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what...”

“His pen spoke more to her than he ever did.In the war of words, some are unwritten and some are unspoken.”

“How might I get over this? How would I be able to overlook the way he used to be with me? How could I overlook that his fingers touched my indiscernible soul before it twisted my nipples? How might...”