“By the way, is there anything sadder than toys on a grave?”

“Every time they have somebody born in the movies, it is a little boy. They never have little girls being born. What makes boys so great and woooonnnderfullll? I can do anything a boy can do”

“There Lives More Faith in Honest Doubt,Believe Me, Than Half the Creeds. - Alfred, Lord Tennyson”

“People cain't help being what they are any more than a skunk can help being a skunk. Don't you think if they had their choice they would rather be something else? Sure they would. People are just weak.”

“I thought I was going to die right there on the spot. I've never heard anything so terrible in my whole life. I hope she is wrong and I never get a period. I am eleven years old and entirely too young to hear about it. Can you imagine my mother not knowing what Kotex are for and dusting the house with them? Well, her mother can just tell her what they are for. I'm not getting into the facts of life. I haven't heard one fact of life I like yet.”

“Grandma Harper has two green bottles shaped like women with black hair painted on their heads and a yellow glass colored captain's hat that she keeps her face powder in that I want too, and a picture of a naked girl in a swing, swinging way up in the air over castles in a blue sky.I don't know why I want those things, I just do.”

“Dena had always been a loner. She did not feel connected to anything. Or anybody. She felt as if everybody else had come into the world with a set of instructions about how to live and someone had forgotten to give them to her. She had no clue what she was supposed to feel, so she had spent her life faking at being a human being, with no idea how other people felt. What was it like to really love someone? To really fit in or belong somewhere? She was quick, and a good mimic, so she learned at an early age to give the impression of a normal, happy girl, but inside she had always been lonely.”