“The confusing lesson whipped Frankie's anger into something she had never felt before. It was like an emotional meringue - the airy feeling of loneliness topped with the hard crisp of injustice. Yet its taste was far from sweet.”

“.. then when the hurt goes, anger takes its place; when the anger runs out of system, loneliness steps in to take over. it's a never ending circle of emotions; every lost emotion being replaced by another.”

“I was sinking deeper in and losing my grasp at the surface. I was drowning. Drowning in an emotion I’d never felt before. Never wanted to feel—until now. Something so fresh, so new. Even as I tried to place this emotion to something, it left me feeling bewildered. I needed more. More of this toxic sweetness I couldn’t help but indulge.”

“She felt the burden of loneliness lift from her, unaware that she had long been wearing it's mantle.”

“Malevolence is born of negative feelings like loneliness and sadness and anger. It comes from an emptiness inside you that feels as if it's been carved out with a knife, an emptiness you're left with when something very important has been taken away from you”

“[T]his expressed only a little of what she felt. The rest was that she had never been loved before. She had believed it, but this was different; this was the hot wind of the desert, at the approach of which the others dropped dead, like mere sweet airs of the garden. It wrapped her about; it lifted her off her feet, while the very taste of it, as of something potent, acrid and strange, forced open her set teeth.”