“Even with everything broken and decided inside her she couldn't quite allow herself to disappear for good.”

“People, I thought, wanted security. They couldn't bear the idea of death being a big black nothing, couldn't bear the thought of their loved ones not existing, and couldn't even imagine themselves not existing. I finally decided that people believed in an afterlife because they couldn't bear not to.”

“She has enough black eyeliner on to outline a corpse, and her skin's so pale she looks like she's just broken dawn.”

“She will forgive my forgetting, just as I forgive her for forgetting me and the Colonel and everyone but herself and her mom in those last moments she spent as a person.”

“And I will forget her, yes. That which came together will fall apart slowly, but she will forgive my forgetting, just as I forgive her for forgetting me and the Colonel and nothing but herself and her mom in those last moments as she spent as a person.”

“I looked at her and she looked at me and we weren’t walking. We were just standing there, and her eyes were so interesting. Not in the usual way of being interesting, like the extremely blue or extremely big of flanked by obscenely long lashes or anything. What interested me about the Duke’s eyes was the complexity of the color- she always said they looked like the bottom of trash-can bins, a swirl of green and brown and yellow but she was underselling herself she always undersold herself. Christ it was hard to unthink”

“Alaska decided to go help Dolores with dinner. She said that it was sexist to leave the cooking to the women, but better to have good sexist food than crappy boy-prepared food.”