“If a ghost were to consider climbing in the window, or seeping through the plaster, he might think twice about facing Maria.”

“She wishes she had time to run around the block once or twice; maybe then she wouldn't feel as if she were about to burn up or shatter.”

“...and from then on whenever he smells lilacs he'll think about this moment. How the bees were circling above him, how purple the ink on the leaflets he's been distributing suddenly seemed, how he realized, all at once, just how beautiful a woman can be.”

“He'd already realized that he could not begin to understand the things men did; now he saw women were even harder to figure out. Sometimes it almost seemed as if they were thinking one thing and talking about something else completely, and you didn't know what to believe: the thing they said or the thing they didn't.”

“He was so pale the freckles stood out on his face the way they did when he was upset or hadn't slept. She thought they might be telling her something if she could only understand the language of freckles.”

“There he is, in the fading light, certain of what he wants, certain of her. If Gillian were speaking to her sister, or more correctly, if Sally were speaking to her, Gillian would draw her over to the window to get a look. Isn't he beautiful? That's what she would have said if she and Sally had been talking. I wish I deserved him, she would have whispered into her sister's ear.”

“Fuck you,” Sally says. She tosses the words off, easy as butter in her mouth, but in fact she doesn't think she's ever cursed out loud in her own house before.“Fuck you twice,” Gillian says. “You need it more.”