“I steeled myself for this interaction. Fact: I knew I could talk to people. Fact: Children were little people. Little, scary people. I took solace in the fact that if this demonstration went horribly wrong, I could probably outrun them.”

“What I don't think has been talked about is the fact that in order to be Hell, the people in Hell could never be sure they were really there.”

“Those stories tended to be located around the places where things went wrong, and people were cruel to one another, and so on. They reflected what was probably the most urgent truth operating in me at that time: oh, shit, things can go wrong, and if they do, people get hurt, and I might be one of them, in spite of the fact that I am, you know, me.”

“It’s a known fact that in life, you can’t have everything. In my heart I knew I loved them both, as much as possible to love two people at the same time. Conrad and I were linked, we would always be linked. That wasn’t something I could do away with. I knew that now—that love wasn’t something you could erase, no matter how hard you tried.”

“People never like me and I never like people," she thought. "And I never can talk as the Crawford children could. They were always talking and laughing and making noises.”

“So what indeed! The lesson I myself learned over and over again when teaching at the college and then the prison was the uselessness of information to most people, except as entertainment. If facts weren't funny or scary, or couldn't make you rich, the heck with them.”