“If you look at old pictures, Irene Casey is so pretty. Not just young, but pretty the way you look when your face goes smooth, the skin around your eyes and lips relaxed, the pretty you only look when you love the person taking the picture.”

“You know I meant it. I am human. And male. And not remotely blind. Do you want me to say it again? You are distractingly, even if-that-is-not-a-real-word pretty. You are so pretty that I bullied Clay Whitaker into drawing me a picture of you so I could look at you when you aren't around. You are so pretty that one of these days I'm going to lose a finger in my garage because I can't concentrate with you so close to me. You are so pretty that I wish you weren't so I wouldn't want to hit every guy at school who looks at you, especially my best friend.”

“Pretty hard to see when you refuse to look. Pretty hard to hear when you refuse to listen.”

“Picture the moment when your mom and dad first saw you as something other than a pretty, tiny version of them. You as them, but improved. Better educated. Innocent. Then picture when you stopped being their dream.”

“That's when I saw you, really saw you for the first time. I didn't intend to look at you, it just happened. It was like those pictures, you know, those optical illusions. You can gaze at them forever and see only one thing. Then when you relax your eyes for just a moment, another picture magically appears. The funny thing with that kind of visual trick it that it's really hard to go back to seeing the original picture once you've seen the new one.”

“When Luce did look in the mirror, she thought she might still be sort of pretty, if you went by what most people thought was pretty. And if that's the way you went, you had your own problems. It wasn't like being pretty was an accomplishment, and it would go away in time. So it would be a mistake to get too hung up on it.”