“She had always thought the word 'pheromones' made it sound as though molecules were floating in the air, shaped like little fluted horns, ready to attach themselves to the nearest target. Microscopic Edison phonographs flying about, their brassy mouths puckered to sucker onto bare unsuspecting skin. These were what he sent out to her. The pheromones. The eyeless babies of energy.”

“Love was a verb with a certain amount of energy attached to it - a daily quota - and you had to choose on whom you wanted to spend this energy. That was love. That was why people had to pray for it. If it were not finite, no one would pine for love in their lives - they would just wait to receive or learn to give.”

“Love was like notches on a speaker that could be cranked up and down, the decibels of desire, the frequencies of feeling. Sometimes she thought that she might have cranked it all the way up and broken the dial before the music had even started.”

“She was in the downstairs bathroom sneaking bites from the macaroons my father's firm always sent us for Christmas. She ate them greedily they were like suns bursting open in her mouth.”

“Sometimes they'd be there for over an hour, the woman pointing out the catalpa trees, the sparrows, the streetlights,the porch, the little boy repeating the words. They laughed as though everything were a marvel in this rundown neighborhood. All common objects no normal person would bother to take note of, unless she thoughts she'd made a terrible mistake, someone who came back again, hoping that if she walked down the same street fate would whirl her backward in time until she was 17, when the future was not something she had stepped into, when it was just a idea, a moment, something that had not disappointed her yet.”

“She told her journal about me passing by her in the parking lot, about how on that night I had touched her-literally, she felt it, reached out. What I had looked like then. How she dreamed about me. How she had fashioned the idea that a spirit could be a sort of second skin for someone, a protective layer somehow. How maybe if she was assiduous she could free us both. I would read over her shoulder as she wrote down her thoughts and wonder if anyone might believe her one day. When she was imagining me, she felt better, less alone, more connected to something out there. To someone out there. She saw the corn field in her dreams, and a new world opening, a world where maybe she could find a foothold too. “You’re a really good poet Ruth,” she imagined me saying, and her journal would release her into a daydream of being such a good poet that her words had the power to resurrect me.”

“When Juliet came flying down the hallway, Stella didn't recognize her friend. Juliet hadn't bothered with makeup; she was wearing a nightgown underneath her raincoat and had on plastic flip-flops. This was the way loved walked in, barely dressed, confused, panic-stricken, overcome, not caring what anyone thought or what they believed.”