“... but the corset had the odd power of making her seem somehow more naked; it turned her into a forbidden, armored creature with a soft side inside he had to hunt for.”

“Listening to Leonard, Madeleine felt impoverished by her happy childhood. She never wondered why she acted the way she did, or what effect her parents had had on her personality. Being fortunate had dulled her powers of observation.”

“...every now and then he would tilt his head back so that his sunglasses reflected sky, and would say, "I love her." Every time he said it he seemed delivered of a profundity that amazed him, as though he had coughed up a pearl.”

“He was like a statue being chiseled away from the inside, hollowed out. As more and more of his thoughts gave him pain, Milton had increasingly avoided them. Instead he concentrated on the few that made him feel better, the bromides about everything working out. Milton, quite simply, had ceased to think things through.”

“She had just started living like a grown-up and she'd never felt more vulnerable, frightened or confused in her life.”

“We couldn't imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm.”

“But by the time Madeleine reached the age that Alwyn had been then, she realized that her sister's iconoclasm and liberationist commitments had just been part of a trend. Alwyn had done the things she had done and voiced the political opinions she'd voiced because all her friends were acting and talking the same way.”