“She lacked the sheen of money, muscular good health, good skin, good clothes.”

“Portia remembered her interview in the small office upstairs...in which she had been so shy, so terrified about not being good enough, not getting this thing, this chance, which she had only just discovered she wanted very badly.”

“All ghost stories come to this, she understood. All ghost stories end in one of two ways: You are dead or I am dead. If people only understood this, Portia thought, they would never be frightened, they would only need to ask themselves, Who among us has died?And then she occurred to her that she was the ghost in her story. She had spent years haunting her own life, without ever noticing.”

“Teammates...were fine things. Piling onto the bus before the game, edgy with shared nerves, egging one another on with the genial, meaningless phrase C'mon, you guys!, collapsing back into the same seats for the ride home—the sense of striving in accord had been a sweet part of high school. Possibly the sweetest. But the camaraderie had not survived graduation, or even the off-seasons. Her teammates, passing in the school corridors in winter or spring, were downshifted to nodding acquaintances who had once been close, that past connection floating off like cotton candy on the tongue.”

“There is a sound to waiting. It sounds like held breath pounding its fists against the walls of the lung, damp and muffled beats.”

“They were soft-centered, emotional beings wrapped in a terrified carapace, that even though they might appear rational and collected on paper, so focused that you wanted to marvel at their promise and maturity, they were lurching, turbulent muddles of conflict in their three-dimensional lives...the creative ones were desperately afraid they were talentless, and the intellectuals deeply suspected they weren't brilliant, and that every single one of them felt ugly and stupid and utterly fake.”

“I used to always worry about money and where it would come from, but now I know that God is the supplier and the giver of good gifts.”