“I'd always liked her in a way I never had to think about, like the fact of my own hands.”

“We had been with the men, we had let them do what they wanted. But they would never know the parts of ourselves that we hid from them - they would never sense the lack or even know there was someth...”

“How sad it was to realize that sometimes you never got there. That sometimes you lived a whole life skittering across the surface as the years passed, unblessed.”

“The hatred that vibrated beneath the surface of my girl's face-- I think Suzanne recognized it. Of course my hand would anticipate the weight of a knife. The particular give of a human body. There ...”

“I knew just being a girl in the world handicapped your ability to believe yourself. Feelings seemed completely unreliable, like faulty gibberish scraped from a Ouija board.”

“But I could not fully admit it, even then. The way Suzanne's face looked as she watched him - I wanted to be with her. I thought that loving someone acted as a kind of protective measure, like they...”

“At that age I looked at women with brutal and emotionless judgement. Assessing the slope of their breasts, imagining how they would look in very crude positions.”

“Do not wait for the last judgment. It comes every day.”

“When one experiences truth, the madness of finding fault with others disappears.”

“Always give your resume of good deeds when you run into someone that you wronged many years ago. They simply need to know today's version of you, before they judge you on yesterday's news.”

“When everything is at its worst, your mind just throws it all into the wastebasket and goes to Florida for a little while. There is a sudden electric what-the-hell glow as you stand there looking b...”

“If God wanted teenagers to be abstinent, puberty would begin at twenty.”