“Most people would say that Joseph treated me like a whore. It was only without him that I actually felt like one.”

“Most girls have a recipe for disaster, but few of them actually find all the ingredients and bake them at the right temperature. If they did, they'd learn to measure more accurately and that they ought to clean up their mess as they go along.”

“Women rule each other. They say that behind every great man there's a great woman, and that may well be right, but behind that woman is a not-so-great one, bawling her eyes out. She's not crying because she didn't meet the man's standards; she's crying because the other woman made them too high”

“Leila. Schoolgirls are like sports cars. They're nice to look at, but they're impractical. In the end, they don't do what you need them to do."I had to stifle my smile, he looked so serious. Then I stole a glance back at the lithe-limbed shadows beneath the tress. "Is that so?""It's true. They won't let you take them up the arse. They're rubbish at sucking you. You want to ride them at a hundred miles a hour, but you end up doing forty in the sixty zone because you're too fucking scared of damaging them.”

“I don't know whether you're the drug or the rehab. Do you know that? But we...we could save the world from each other.”

“Where you moonlight you will find wolves, and your world will burn beneath them.”

“The school year progressed slowly. I felt as if I had been in the sixth grade for years, yet it was only October. Halloween was approaching. Coming from Ireland, we had never thought of it as a big holiday, though Sarah and I usually went out trick-or treating. For the last couple of years I had been too sick to go out, but this year Halloween fell on a day when I felt quiet fine. My mother was the one who came up with the Eskimo idea. I put on a winter coat, made a fish out of paper, which I hung on the end of a stick, and wrapped my face up in a scarf. My hair was growing in, and I loved the way the top of the hood rubbed against it. By this time my hat had become part of me; I took it off only at home. Sometimes kids would make fun of me, run past me, knock my hat off, and call me Baldy. I hated this, but I assumed that one day my hair would grow in, and on that day the teasing would end.We walked around the neighborhood with our pillowcase sacks, running into other groups of kids and comparing notes: the house three doors down gave whole candy bars, while the house next to that gave only cheap mints. I felt wonderful. It was only as the night wore on and the moon came out and the older kids, the big kids, went on their rounds that I began to realize why I felt so good. No one could see me clearly. No one could see my face.”