“Down the Peninsula at Cypress Lawn Cemetery, a woman in a paisley turban climbed out of a battered automobile and trudged up the hillside to a new grave.She stood there for a moment, humming to herself, then removed a joint from a tortoise-shell cigarette case and laid it gently on the grave."Have fun," she smiled. "It's Colombian.”

“A woman doesn't want to be told she looks nice,' Jude nuttered as she sat down beside maud's grave. "She wants to be told she's beautiful, sexy. That she looks outrageous. It dosen't matter if its not true.' She sighed and laid the flowers against the headstone. 'Because for the moment, when the words are said and the words are heard, it's perfect truth.”

“Neither of them noticed Jane for a moment, which was for the best, as Jane looked like parts of her had been ripped up and flung into the wind.While Hunter smiled at Savannah, little pieces of Jane fluttered down to the parking lot. ...She waded through the litter of her old self and climbed into the battered Taurus.”

“Grow up? Get herself straightened out? Her mind reeled from the verbal battering. No matter what she did, her father would tell her she was wrong. Worthless. Undeserving.”

“He stood beneath the white tower, and looked up at it with that mournful expression which his face always carried in repose: for one moment he thought of climbing up its cracked and broken stone, and then from its summit screaming down at the silent city as a child might scream at a chained animal.”

“How can I ever make you understand Cassie and me? I would have to take you there, walk you down every path of our secret shared geography. The truism says it’s against all odds for a straight man and woman to be real friends, platonic friends; we rolled thirteen, threw down five aces and ran away giggling. She was the summertime cousin out of storybooks, the one you taught to swim at some midge-humming lake and pestered with tadpoles down her swimsuit, with whom you practiced first kisses on a heather hillside and laughed about it years later over a clandestine joint in your granny’s cluttered attic. She painted my fingernails gold and dared me to leave them that way for work…We climbed out her window and down the fire escape and lay on the roof of the extension below, drinking improvised cocktails and singing Tom Waits and watching the stars spin dizzily around us.No.”