“Her efforts received encouragement. In fact, they were welcomed as the Tallises began to understand that the baby of the family possessed a strange mind and a facility with words. The long afternoons she spent browsing through the dictionary and thesaurus made for constructions that were inept, but hauntingly so: the coins a villain concealed in his pocket were 'esoteric,' a hoodlum caught stealing a car wept in 'shameless auto-exculpation,' the heroine on her thoroughbred stallion made a 'cursory' journey through the night, the king's furrowed brow was the 'hieroglyph' of his displeasure.”

“What did she say?''She made her displeasure with his existence clear.''That's it?''She made some claims about how she was going to alleviate her displeasure.”

“She didn't know that all her life would be spent gambling with the stark rigidity of words, words that were coin: save, spend and all the time George with his own counter had found her a way out.”

“Everything about him enveloped her, made her crave exactly this. His possession. In her mind something relaxed; the balance shifted. She welcomed every way he could touch her, the heat from his body, the atoms of his breath. Everything.”

“However, at fourteen years old, she didn’t understand that all those terrible troubles the heroines in her books went through in real life hurt.That the words were just words on a page, but in real life, the pain was immense. Trials and tribulations to prove your love were exactly that, trials and tribulations.”

“Somewhere in the world there was a young woman with such splendid understanding that she'd see him entire, like a poem or story, and find his words so valuable after all that when he confessed his apprehensions she would explain why they were in fact the very things that made him precious to her...and to Western Civilization! There was no such girl, the simple truth being.”