“She knows herself to be at the mercy of events, and she knows by now that events have no mercy.”

“There are things I need to ask her. Not what happened, back then in the time I lost, because now I know that. I need to ask her why. If she remembers. Perhaps she’s forgotten the bad things, what she said to me, what she did. Or she does remember them, but in a minor way, as if remembering a game, or a single prank, a single trivial secret, of the kind girls tell and then forget. She will have her own version. I am not the centre of her story, because she herself is that. But I could give her something you can never have, except from another person: what you look like from outside. A reflection. This is part of herself I could give back to her. We are like the twins in old fables, each of whom has been given half a key.”

“On the way home from school we go to the record store... [Cordelia] expects me to roll my eyes in ecstasy, the way she does; she expects me to groan. She knows the rituals, she knows how we're supposed to be behaving, now that we're in high school. But I think these things are impenetrable and fraudulent, and I can't do them without feeling I'm acting.”

“Every child should have love, every person should have it. She herself would rather have had her mother's love - the love she still continued to believe in, the love that had followed her through the jungle in the form of a bird so she would not be too frightened or lonely.”

“She knows the rituals, she knows how we're supposed to be behaving...But I think these things are impenetrable and fraudulent, and I can't do them without feeling I'm acting.”

“Only a girl like thiscan know what's happened to you.If she were here she wouldreach out her arms towardsyou now, and touch youwith her absent handsand you would feel nothing, but you would betouched all the same.”

“Fuck, thinks Stan. She knows about the chickens.”