“...no genius, I am a girl who knows too much to know anything at all...”

“...all I'm saying is that worrying about it isn't going to fix anything. The only thing we can do is keep on with our own small thing and try hard to be good and to make life better, and know that if it all ends tomorrow that we were at least happy.”

“Depressing thought: my friends were the girls I ate lunch with, all buddies from kindergarten who knew one another so well we weren't sure if we even liked one another anymore.”

“On the nights I stuffed myself full of myths, I dreamed of college, of being pumped full of all the old knowledge until I knew everything there was to know, all the past cultures picked clean like delicious roasted chicken.”

“...sick, my brothers are sending me home. This place infects me. Templeton my smooth little pill... such images I have. Such voices, that high voice, the little girl's so naughty, talking to me, all the time now. How I hate her... the train is empty, Albany a small, spangled fish... this train is all brown velvet... the train slows, I am in Templeton, oh. Templeton, Templeton, the train says, slowing down. The lake, the blue, is an embrace.”

“...right now, right now, I am strange. It is strange. This life is strange. For now, only for now, I am happy.”

“Lucrezia has never seen her own face, and cannot know its expressions--how, at that moment, her smile was an explosion.”