“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.”

“That was normal. That was regular and real.. It didn't look like a place [she] could get to from here.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I would take today's joy, and tomorrow's. I would take it with both hands, anywhere it came.”

“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.”

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