“Bullfrak," Miranda said. "It's for power. If you're pretending this is about something else, even to yourself, then frak you, you delusional murdering excuse for a nutty professor.”

“Something out of childhood whistles through this space, a sense of games and half-made selves, but it's not that you're pretending to be someone else. You're pretending to be exactly who you are. That's the curious thing.”

“Sometimes they threaten you with something - something you can't stand up to, can't even think about. And then you say, "Don't do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to So-and-so." And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn't mean it. But that isn't true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there's no other way of saving yourself, and you're quite ready to save yourself that way. You WANT it to happen to the other person. You don't give a damn what they suffer. All you care is yourself.”

“Why pretend to be something you're not? If you have to be someone, be someone no one else is.”

“When you're rotten about yourself, you become rotten to everyone else, even thoseyou love.”

“Forgiveness is not something you do for someone else; it's something you do for yourself. To forgive is not to condone, it is to refuse to continue feeling bad about an injury.”