“We teach our girls how not to get raped with a sense of doom, a sense that we are fighting a losing battle. When I was writing this novel, friend after friend came to me telling me of something tha...”

“I like it better when my room is pitch black, when the dark is so thick it swallows me up and I feel as if I could drown in it.”

“When did we all become fluent in this language that none of us wanted to learn?”

“Yes, Latinos dream more. When you live in poverty, when your president is imposed upon you, when they kill someone and no one gets indicted, and when only a few get rich, of course you dream more. ...”

“It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are in some degree independent of men.”

“I look at Kitty, who's braiding Chris's hair in microbraids. She's being extra quiet so we forget she's here and don't kick her out. 'I think that as long as you're ready and it's what you want to ...”

“The power of the harasser, the abuser, the rapist depends above all on the silence of women.”

“What's the point of obsessing over cholesterol or bike helmets or even cigarettes when the biggest threats to our children are being released back into society every day? Yes, maybe 'some' of them ...”

“greater sexual freedom expands the grey area between consensual sex and rape”

“When we suggest victims can stop rape, we also (however unintentionally) imply that rape is an inevitable aspect of life rather than an action deliberately carried out by a perpetrator.”

“As long as we as a society continue to belittle and dismiss women's accounts, disbelieve and question their stories, and blame them for their own assaults, we are playing right into the hands of th...”

“The very fact that it is necessary in the twenty-first century to explain why it's not okay to publicly debate whether or not women are "asking" for sexual assault is mind-boggling.”