“She knew that she could not have reached this white serenity except as the sum of all the colors, of all the violence she had known.”

“The white noise in his heart, the sum of all his colors —the metronome to which he beat [was she].”

“she had never known who she was at all, except sometimes for a moment in meditation, when her I am became It is, and she breathed the stars”

“She knew then that white was more than a color: It was a cold, pale shade of understanding that seems to take all of your hope away.”

“She imagined herself both queen and slave, dominatrix and victim. In her imagination she was making love with men of all skin colors--white, black, yellow--with homosexuals and beggars. She was anyone's, and anyone could do anything to her. She had one, two, three orgasms, one after another. She imagined everything she had never imagined before, and she gave herself to all that was most base and most pure.”

“With all the planning she’d done, she must have known she was leaving, and even she couldn’t have been totally immune to the feeling. She’d had good days here. And on the last day, the bad days become so difficult to recall, because one way or another, she made a life here, just as I had. The town was paper, but the memories were not. All the things I’d done here, all the love and pity and compassion and violence and spite, kept welling up inside me. These whitewashed cinder-block walls. My white walls. Margo’s white walls. We’d been captive in them for so long, stuck in their belly like Jonah.”