“Love's an illusion. It's a dream you wake up from with an enormous hangover and net credit debt. I'd rather have cash.”

“Love is a check, that can be forged, that can be cashed. Love is a payment that comes due.”

“She wanted to wake up like Dorothy and see Michael's face peering over the side of the bed, laughing. WHY, YOU JUST HIT YOUR HEAD. But it was not a dream and there was no Kansas and he was never coming back.”

“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.”

“The decor bowled me over. Everywhere I looked, there was something more to see. Botanical prints, a cross section of pomegranates, a passionflower vine and its fruit. Stacks of thick books on art and design and a collection of glass paperweights filled the coffee table. It was enormously beautiful, a sensibility I'd never encountered anywhere, a relaxed luxury. I could feel my mother's contemptuous gaze falling on the cluttered surfaces, but I was tired of three white flowers in a glass vase. There was more to life than that.”

“Isn't it funny. I'm enjoying my hatred so much more than I ever enjoyed love. Love is temperamental. Tiring. It makes demands. Love uses you, changes its mind. But hatred, now, that's something you can use. Sculpt. Wield. It's hard, or soft, however you need it. Love humiliates you, but Hatred cradles you.”

“Their love as a dragonfly, skimming over echo park, stoppin to visit the lotus. Eating dreams and drinking blue sky.”