“She may have looked normal on the outside, but once you'd seen her handwriting you knew she was deliciously complicated inside.”

“It was one-way glass, and I was on the inside and she was on the outside. She was looking at me with the confidence of a woman who knows she won’t be scrutinized for scrutinizing me, and I was looking at her like I normally look at myself—though she probably thought I was staring at her breasts. Well, can you blame me? I had a stain on my shirt—and she had great tits.”

“She felt just like that girl in that book with the letter A on her chest. Only her A signified Alone. She was an outcast, cast out by her own choices, an outsider with a pretty face. Like a rose, she may have been beautiful to look at, but almost everyone only knew the thorny side.”

“She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them.”

“The little bitch. She didn't have her files in another computer. She kept everything she knew inside her head.”

“She had thought she'd already reached her capacity for pain and had no room inside her for more. But she remembered having told Archer once that you could not measure love on a scale of degrees, and now she understood that it was the same with pain. Pain might escalate upwards, and, just when you'd thought you'd reached your limit, begin to spread sideways, and spill out, and touch other people, and mix with their pain. And grow larger, but somehow less oppressive. She had thought herself trapped in a place outside the ordinary feeling lives of other people; she had not noticed how many other people were trapped in that place with her.”