“I wanted her note to say that I was a red hole dug out of the guts of her, a seeping wound that hadn’t healed a lick in the twenty-odd years since she had left me.”

“She had shown Laura that David was less hers than she had ever thought and the pieces of him she did own were being taken.”

“sex was where laurel knew she knew him, and talking was the way she called him to her.”

“Saying it it loud, she felt every inch of distance between them.”

“I step straight toward the female librarian. She looks soft, as if she's been raised in a box and purely milk-fed, like veal.”

“I'd thought Clarice's smile was both too dim and friendly and too wide and white, so that she looked to me like the love child of a cannibal and a Labrador retriever.”

“I had been born and mostly raised in the South, so I ought to have been able to find a way to reach him. Southern girls are trained from birth up that the way to a man's heart is never through the front door. They may leave a basket of cookies there, and while he's busy picking them up, they're squirming in through a back window.”