“She was halfway up the ledge and halfway down and had never felt so alone in all her life.”

“(Erica) "Hello? Did you not get the memo? Vampires are hot! Besides, compared to most cities, we barely even have a vampire population. I heard Seattle has like, ten times as many because the sun barely shines up there. We just need to find a man who will pound all those negative thoughts right out of your brain with his big, fat cock!"(Karli) "Ugh, don't remind me I don't have one of those either!" I whined.”

“Maybe the real problem wasn’t that she had nothing to write about, but that she had too much. Maybe she wasn’t afraid of her finiteness after all, but rather Infinity and how it called her to begin somewhere, anywhere. To begin might be an acceptance that indeed she was some kind of creator, with tremendous powers. It might mean taking people’s lives into her hands–her own life, her friends’, even her father’s or mother’s. And maybe she was afraid they would think she had animated a wandering Frankenstein no one wanted to hold.”

“Laura thought Bell would have a few things to say to Pynchon. And Laura had a few things to say to Bell, like, How the hell was a writer supposed to know when she was one-fifth through her novel-writing, so she could cut a door into the wall and shove her character out into the forest?”

“From her own life experience Keldaren knew that loveable hunks were in short supply anywhere in the galaxy, loveable hunks who knew her were an extinct species, and that more marketing companies than friends had her phone number.”

“You could use a moth like that as a symbol in a novel, but it was trite, wasn’t it? The old moth-to-the-flame image had been used and used again. It was the stuff of amateur poetry. And she, having so little experience crafting a story, would be the most in danger of falling into trite approaches. If she wrote a novel, it probably would be about her father. And the male Luna moth would haunt its pages. Everyone would recognize the work as that of a first novelist. “She wrote about herself through the lens of her father.”The really good novelists, Laura thought, put their fathers, and maybe their mothers too, deeper into the stories. Which, she suddenly thought, might redeem Melville just the littlest bit.”

“If she was going to write a novel, she felt defeated before she began, because someone might be coming along to pick it apart, looking for symbols like The Conch or The Whale, which seemed to have mythic proportions.”