“I wished I could shut it in a locket to wear aroung my neck. I wish a thousand-year sleep would find us, at this absolute second, like the sleep over the castle of Sleeping Beauty.”

“The cake had a trick candle that wouldn't go out, so I didn't get my wish. Which was just that it would always be like this, that my life could be a party just for me.”

“The Santa Anas blew in hot from the desert, shriveling the last of the spring grass into whiskers of pale straw. Only the oleanders thrived, their delicate poisonous blooms, their dagger green leaves. We could not sleep in the hot dry nights, my mother and I.”

“Beauty was deceptive. I would rather wear my pain, my ugliness. I was torn and stitched. I was a strip mine, and they would just have to look. I hoped I made them sick. I hoped they saw me in their dreams.”

“Although she was giddy with exhaustion, sleep was a lover who refused to be touched....”

“I wished I could draw the way her broad-shouldered body threw a shadow on the moonpale dust. How brave she looked just then.”

“The pearls weren't really white, they were a warm oyster beige, with little knots in between so if they broke, you only lost one. I wished my life could be like that, knotted up so that even if something broke, the whole thing wouldn't come apart.”