“Beauty tips. How to look younger: Don't be born so soon.”

“The best way to look five years younger is to be born 5 years later”

“I looked down at my stomach. I grabbed at it, seeing how much fat I could lift up in a roll."Don't worry," you said, one eye open again like a crocodile watching me. "You're beautiful." You tipped your head back. "Beautiful," you murmured. "Perfect.”

“The old order, it is good for the old. A farmer wants his son to be afraid of beautiful women, so that he will not leave home too soon, so he tells a story about how one drowned his brother’s cousin’s friend in a lake, not because he was a pig who deserved to be drowned, but because beautiful women are bad, and also witches. And it doesn’t matter that she didn’t ask to be beautiful, or to be born in a lake, or to live forever, or to not know how men breathe until they stop doing it.”

“So how come it looks so beautiful?How come the moon falls from the sky?”

“Asleep, he looked a lot younger than going-on-seventeen, but I had noticed that Johnny looked younger when he was asleep too, so I figured everyone did. Maybe people are younger when they are asleep.”