“Girls do not dress for boys. They dress for themselves and, of course, each other. If girls dressed for boys they’d just walk around naked at all times.”

“I'd learned myself by the age of sixteen that just as girls guarded their virginity, boys guarded something less tangible which they called Themselves.”

“You are so beautiful in that little black dress.""Every girl should own a little black dress""Every boy should see his girl in one.”

“A boy and a girl, dressed in the T-shirts and denim that are the shabby uniform of this age.”

“But boys will be boys, even the ones who are only girls dressed up: That's one of the rules of the world.”

“Language is the dress of thought.”

“She smoothes the front of the dress, looking down at her hands, at her bitten fingernails, at her big feet in the pointy-toes shoes. This is a woman's dress, she thinks, a young woman's dress. It is not a girl's dress. It is solidly on the other side of the line outside of girlhood. It is a dress that says something big in a very quiet way; it is a dress that is talking to Alice right now, a dress that is making her feel possibilities never before considered, the possibility of perfume and pretty and dancing and boys. This dress is who she might be, only more so.”