“It was impossible to tell how she felt. When she tried to look inside of herself, all she saw were tangled things shifting in and out of focus.”

“Of Dixie Doyle it is said that she could convince grown men of anything. While she is only a mediocre student and a wholly untalented tennis player, she possesses a quality of performed girlishness that turns sex into a ragged paradox for men beyond the age of thirty. She speaks with the hint of a babyish lisp, the pink end of her tongue frequently peeking out from between her teeth, but her eyes are implacable fields of gray that at any moment could conceal everything you imagine - or nothing at all. She might be an X-ray registering the skeleton of your soul, or, like Oscar Wilde's women, she might be a sphinx without a secret.”

“She looks at herself in the mirror. The idea is to look sexy again. And for whom exactly? Yourself, of course. Yes, well, that's all wonderfully self-affirming and very strong-minded as any decent woman should be these days, but let's just face facts here and say that when a woman - no, when a person is thinking about feeling sexy, it is always with the idea of someone else in mind. ”

“These things, she felt, were not to be passed around like disingenuous party favors. She kept an honor code with her journals and her poems. 'Inside, inside,' she would whisper quietly to herself when she felt the urge to tell...”

“I think we’re losing sight of what our ultimate goal is here,” said Genevieve. But we feared that if she was washed out, people would look right past the flyer.”

“The most romantic things a man can do for a woman are the little things that let her know that she's on his mind and in his heart.”

“I was convinced that she was about to tell me my card was declined, and assumed Derek wanting to talk later meant he'd soon be telling me our life was declined. Everything, everyone had reached their limits with me.”