“For twenty-four hours, she'd been running on her standard triple A's: ambition, adrenaline, and anxiety. Add two gut-wrenching plane rides on less than two hours sleep and her nerves, like her muscles, were screaming. None of this, she knew was visible even to the keenest observer. And she meant to keep it that way.”

“If we were watching a show for two hours I would go if it meant being with her.”

“That was the dirty secret associated with her past. Not that she'd been abused but that somehow she felt that she deserved it because she'd let it happen. Even now, it shamed her, and there were times when she felt hideously ugly, as though the scars that had been left behind were visible to everyone.”

“I love the way she projects two facets: a visible persona and a subterranean one. She keeps her thoughts to herself; she seems to suggest that her secret, inner life is at least as significant as the appearance she gives.”

“There were several ways of understanding her: there was what she said, and there was what she meant, and there was something between the two, that was neither.”

“It has been said that civilization is twenty-four hours and two meals away from barbarism.”