“Mattie sat at the table, obsessing, orbiting around herself. She was sick of her worried, hostile mind. It would have killed her long before, she felt, if it hadn't needed the transportation.”

“She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts if family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the led; if there was a draft she sat in it-- in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others... I did my best to kill her. My excuse, if I were to be had up in a court of law, would be that I acted in self defense. Had I not killed her, she would have killed me.”

“It might have felt easier if she'd been able to say that she moved across the room to him in a trance, as if he were a vampire exerting some kind of mind control. That would have been a cop-out, though. Not to mention a lie. She was exquisitely aware of every movement she made as she uncurled her legs, rose from her chair and walked slowly and carefully around the end of the coffee table towards him. She felt the wide hem of her yoga pants sway around her ankles, felt the nap of the blue-and-green area rug and then the cool smoothness of the wooden floorboards beneath her feet. She felt the way the thick sofa cushions gave beneath her as she sat beside him and the pull of gravity when his heavier weight made a deeper depression that her body rolled naturally into...And then she felt everything.”

“So often, she had found herself transported by music. She would get lost, lose herself to the time and fullness of the tones, the way it conjured up air around her as she listened or as she played. But this, she thought, one did not get lost in this music.One was delivered by it.”

“She should feel sick. Horrified, stunned. But the horrible truth was, she felt fine. He killed. He killed to protect her. And someancient, atavistic streak inside her wanted to preen and purr. She was one sick puppy.”

“These things, she felt, were not to be passed around like disingenuous party favors. She kept an honor code with her journals and her poems. 'Inside, inside,' she would whisper quietly to herself when she felt the urge to tell...”