“I take you for a girl who's eager to grow unstable at the first indication that things can come back to haunt a person, even after she has given them up for dead.”

“So, now he's driving around with a little boy and a dead girl..." he prompted."Yeah, a dead girl in the back seat and a catatonic little boy up front." She paused. "He did pretty good considering."She took a deep breath. "And right after he crossed the Sabine River, just outside of Orange, I sat up.""You what? You just sat up?" He almost laughed at the image it conjured. This shouldn't be funny, not even in a gallows humor sort of way."Yeah. I don't think I remembered, just at that moment, that I'd been dead. I sat up, saw them and said, 'Why is Dylan in the front seat?'""First thing back from the dead, you start bitching?”

“Ruth had been a girl haunted and now she would be a woman haunted. First by accident and now by choice. All of it, the story of my life and death, was hers if she chose to tell it, even to one person at a time.”

“If I die, I am so coming back to haunt you.”“You can even watch me shower.”

“I used to believe, although I don't now, that growing and growing up are analogous, that both are inevitable and uncontrollable processes. Now it seems to me that growing up is governed by the will, that one can choose to become an adult, but only at given moments. These moments come along fairly infrequently -during crises in relationships, for example, or when one has been given the chance to start afresh somewhere- and one can ignore them or seize them.”

“I mean most girls are so dumb and all. After you neck them for a while, you can really watch them losing their brains. You take a girl when she really gets passionate, she just hasn't any brains.”