“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...”

“Fear finds its prey in adolescents for the exact same reason fearlessness does. Every cut, scrape, broken arm or cancer is a cut, scrape, broken arm or cancer that has yet to arrive, that is on the...”

“No adolescent ever wants to be understood, which is why they complain about being misunderstood all the time.”

“It pained me to imagine how our twosome appeared to others, marked as those kind of girls who belonged to each other. Those sexless fixtures of high school.”

“Martin is your best friend, isn't he?' a sweet and well-intentioned girl once said when both of us were present: it was the only time I ever felt awkward about this precious idea, which seemed some...”

“It figured my family would get along better with Clark than they did me.”

“The existence of other people is essentially awkward.”

“I don't know if anyone's ever told you this", he begins. He doesn't blush, and his eyes don't dart away. Instead I find myself staring into a pair of oceans - one perfect, the other blemished by th...”

“Im stuck babysitting turtle eggs while a volleyball player slash grease monkey slash aquarium volunteer tries to hit on me. Im not hitting on you, he protested.No?Believe me, youd know if I was hit...”

“Sam laughed, a funny, self-deprecating laugh. "You did read a lot. And spent too much time just inside the kitchen window, where I couldn't see you very well.""And not enough time mostly naked in f...”