“Sometimes she felt she had fallen asleep inside herself while she was wide awake working.”

“This is shitty to say, but there's not much pathos involved in a case like that. Think about it: Little So-and-so the Fourth drowns himself Tuesday night after receiving his midterm grades in the school of civil engineering. The body goes back to Westchester, and a lounge in the library or a nature path gets named after him, and a bunch of blue-blood kids remember him fondly. Sorry. There's about one story a year like that. Poor Billy Fuckup, Jr., in his Gap khakis, the pressure of going to classes all day really got to him. If I were a better person, I would have felt badly having seen things like that.”

“How disposable is a woman's life? How expected. How unsurprising. How normal. How many times a week, a month, a year does that happen?”

“'A man can only take so much pretty walking back and forth in front of him.' He said pretty like he meant something else.”

“Meg was a great reader and was never without a book; while walking to school she often had one open in her hands, so engrossed she would sometimes trip while navigating familiar streets.”

“She wishes nightmares were all that kept her awake. She cannot tell which disturbs here more, the future or the past.”

“He pumped her roughly, filling the room with the sounds of their breathing and the smell of their sin. She felt drunk, this man’s harsh energy as intoxicating as ten bottles of wine. She stroked his chest and dug her fingernails into his shoulders. Spurs, telling him to make it rougher.”