“Her grief still burdened her, and she knew she would bear it the rest of her days.”

“She was still dressed in her cheerleading uniform from school that day, her eyes red and rimmed with smudged mascara. She looked like a raccoon with team spirit.”

“She was wearing her T-shirt with the bull’s-eye printed over her heart, the one that says, GO AHEAD AND TRY IT, BUFFY.”

“She raised her head again. "Aren't you supposed to come over all manly man and forbid the little lady from taking such risks with her fragile self?" "I like my balls right where they are," he said, and she laughed and put her head back down on his chest.Kate Shugak to Jim Chopin Though Not Dead”

“But here's something that I know about friendship: Sometimes the right thing to do is to not point out that your friend hasn't touched her chicken fingers or French fries and not point that maybe she's just overreacting. Instead, you just smile and sit with her and say, "I understand" when really, you don't understand her at all.”

“He closed his eyes, shook his head. If he could get her alone somewhere, somewhere completely private, he'd kill her. He would break a rock over her head and split her skull open so that he could see, just for a second, what the fuck was in her mind.”

“One day in 1948 or 1949, the Brentwood County Mart, a shopping complex in an upscale neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, was the scene of a slight disturbance that carried overtones of the most spectacular upheaval in twientieth-century music. Marta Feuchtwanger, wife of émigré novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, was examining grapefruit in the produce section when she heard a voice shouting German from the far end of the aisle. She looked up to see Arnold Schoenberg, the pioneer of atonal music and the codifier of twelve-tone composition, bearing down on her, with his bald pate and burning eyes. Decades later, in conversation with the writer Lawrence Weschler, Feuchtwanger could recall every detail of the encounter, including the weight of the grapefruit in her hand. “Lies, Frau Marta, lies!” Schoenberg was yelling. “You have to know, I never had syphilis!”