“She had no images of this love. She could offer no anecdotes. It was a belief rather than a memory.”

“Long ago she had become more ambitious than feeling. She had fallen in love with images instead of living things. Except for Linh.”

“The publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.”

“In memory, she lived and moved and laughed, but all that a photograph could offer was one frozen moment of a life.”

“She could recall almost nothing of them. She tried a thousand times, but for the greater part that section of her memory was as smooth and numb as scar tissue. Sometimes, just sometimes, she convinced herself that she could remember stray images or impressions, but she could not describe them properly or make sense of them.”

“The strange thing; her face, after she hit me. She was in greater pain than I. You could see it in her eyes - like she had been violated in some way that broke her own image.”