“I want to wake Chrissie and tell her this as if it's a warning: Don't push too hard; your last chance to see a person the way you wanted them to be may come at any moment. One minute you have a par...”

“When I was very little, my mother used to say there was something of my grandmother in me, in how I tell stories the way I need them to be and not the way they actually happened.”

“She wondered sometimes if it wasn't all pretenseif, when she shut her eyes and wished restitution upon the whole wounded parade of humanity, she wasn't really wishing away the world that created wa...”

“She wondered sometimes if it wasn't all pretense—if, when she shut her eyes and wished restitution upon the whole wounded parade of humanity, she wasn't really wishing away the world that created w...”

“I'd still thought that everything I thought about that night-the shame, the fear-would fade in time. But that hadn't happened. Instead, the things that I remembered, these little details, seemed to...”

“Not being assaulted is not a privilege to be earned through the judicious application of personal safety strategies. A woman should be able to walk down the street at 4 in the morning in nothing bu...”

“Youre looking for sexual tidbits as a female child, and the only ones that present themselves depict child rape or other violations (all my favorite books in my preteen years: I Know Why the Caged ...”

“Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.”

“As time and space are bent by gravity, so too is truth bent by power.”

“What a curious power words have.”

“Sex can be used either for self-affirmation or for self-transcendence either to intensify the ego and consolidate the social persona by some kind of conspicuous embarkation and heroic conquest, or...”

“He didn't know all that much about how the machinery worked anyway. Such knowledge was for specialists. In war, as in love, he was a fearless, happy-go-lucky adventurer.”

“If she did experience sex--or something close to it--in high school, I'm sure it would have been less out of sexual desire or love than literary curiosity.”