“When you have nothing inside you, you feel everything more, and feel you can control it all.”

“If you didn't feel it on your body long after he'd left, was it really worth laying for him? I wanted to feel that.”

“You have to decide who you are, little girl, she told me once. Once you know that, everyone else will too.”

“Pretend you're me," she says. I can barely see her over the frothy mound.And it happens just like that.A feeling of sinking, a falling deep inside.And I'm her.And this is my house, and Matt French is my husband, tallying columns all day, working late into the night for me, for me.And here I am, my tight, my perfect body, my pretty, perfect face, and nothing could ever be wrong with me, or my life, not even the sorrow that is plainly right there in the center of it. Oh, Colette, it's right there in the center of you, and some kind of despair too. Colette----that silk sucking into my mouth, the weight of it now, and I can't catch my breath, my breath.”

“I feel a shaking in me, and it's the ground. It's like the ground is shaking and I will slip through.Then, in a flash, his hands reach out and, like in a movie, really, the coffee cup falls to the cement steps with a sharp crack, and he grabs my arms and his face is filled with everything that is urgent and loving and meaningful in the world.I feel so powerful, like a god, thunderbolt in hand.And my thunderbolt hit.”

“No, this is throwing up like coming off the tilt-a-whirl at age seven, like discovering that dead rat under the porch, like finding out someone you loved never loved you at all.”

“Did she look at us that first week and see past the glossed hair and the shiny legs, our glittered brow bones and girl bravado? See past all that to everything beneath, all our miseries, the way we all hated ourselves but much more everyone else? Could she see past all of that to something else, something quivering and real, something poised to be transformed, turned out, made? See that she could make us, stick her hands in our glitter-gritted insides and build us into magnificent teen gladiators?”