“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.”

“I know you like me, Ara. You don't have to pretend, just because you think it's improper to fall for someone at first sight.” His eyes lit up, shimmering green like a glass marble held up to the sun. “I can see that you feel the same way I do.”Oh, my God! Is this the point where I can jump off the swing and fall into his waiting arms? No. Don't do that. Don't read into it too much. I looked away from his gleaming, white-toothed grin, and clutched the ropes of the swing tighter.”

“She’d wanted to completely shave her head: I don’t want long hair, I don’t want short hair, I don’t want hair at all, and I don’t want to be a girl or a boy, I want to be a yellow and orange leaf some little kid picks up and pastes in his scrapbook.”

“He thought that maybe when you're making your way forward into your life, it just looks higgledy-piggledy, the way, if you were a fly walking across one of Beautiful Girl's drawings all you'd be able to see was green, then blue, then yellow. Only if you got in the air before the swat came down would you see the colors belonged to a big drawing, with the green for this part of the picture, the blue and yellow for others, every color being just where if was meant to be. Could that be what life was?”

“... paint in blue and black...sometimes gray - the colors of night - occasionally I surprise you with a mustard yellow, but then, I am a poet ...”

“She got icing all over her face. I think that's why I like her. For the good stuff, she's willing to get icing all over her face. Who wouldn't want a girl like that?”