“The problem with being a modern woman, I thought, as the front door swung wide, is that you have to pretend to be stronger than you are.”

“When you love a woman, you love yourself, and it's terrible really, how it seems perfectly possible to swallow the other. With a man you want to join, you want your ribs to connect like handcuffs. But with a woman if you swallow, she becomes you.”

“I thought of happy endings, how novelists usually flinched. To admit your characters are doomed means you are too.”

“I know the girl is right because the snake is in me, knotted around my intestines, hanging off my ribs, snuggled like a lover around my black heart. "I love you," I said, addressing the snake, Madison, Bell, Kevin, Pig, my mother, my past lives and the new lover speeding toward me at this very moment. I wondered if it mattered whether you loved one person or another. Weren't lovers interchangeable when you thought back about them? Maybe that was true in the future too. What I really loved was the note. I always loved odd things: the blue curacao bottle, the wet asphalt, my own insipid fear.”

“For awhile, staring at my paper bag of clothes, my freaked-out eyes in the mirror behind the bar, I convinced myself I would go back to Bell. He was the only man that ever made me feel in life instead of just a spectator, and if he did that by fear and pain, it was still better then when I looked numbly at some man on the couch thinking, I will leave you soon.”

“Sex is a kind of alchemy. It's the one thing other than death that if used properly can change everything, like that first night with Madison, it's all in my head like a beautiful dream. I remember her skin. Its texture made me believe I'd never die.”

“The story of Adam and Eve has less to do with evil than the cosmic human sadness that relationships are never straightforward, never pure enough.”