“It reminded me of how I’d felt applying to college. Night after night, I sat with my father in his study while he read aloud from Baron’s. He’d read the name of the college, the number of men and the number of women, and a description in guidebook prose; then he’d say, ‘How does that sound?’ and I’d think, Sounds just like the last one.It took me a few nights to realize that my father was reading only the colleges that I had some chance of getting into – not Brown but Bowling Green; not Wesleyan but Ohio Wesleyan; not Williams or Smith, but William Smith. Until that moment, it hadn’t occurred to me that my grades and test scores over the years were anything more than individual humiliations; I hadn’t realized that one day all of them would add up and count against me.”

“A faint rattling pulled me from sleep, which was a relief because I’d been caught in yet another nightmare. After what Rick, my now-former foster father, had done to me, one would think he’d be the one haunting my dreams. And he had something to do with it—he’d revived me the night I tried to kill myself. In the moments before he had, I was certain I’d been standing at the gates of hell, about to be sucked in. Unfortunately, when Rick revived me, I’d brought a piece of hell back with me. That was what I dreamed about. Every night. A dark, walled city. Wandering, lost, trapped. A voice whispering to me, You’re perfect. Come back.Stay.”

“It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair that I’d stumbled across the kind of man I used to find irresistible, or that he’d managed to stare right inside my brain to locate my weaknesses. The thrill of being wanted while pretending not to be interested was a game I’d played over and over during my youth. I’d grown up since then. I’d done more than my share of getting mixed up with men who were all ego and muscles, and he reminded me exactly why I’d given them up. Unfortunately, my body hadn’t got the memo yet.”

“It didn't occur to me that my books would be widely read at all, and that enabled me to write anything I wanted to. And even once I realized that they were being read, I still wrote as if I were writing in secret. That's how one has to write anyway--in secret.”

“I suppose she chose me because she knew my name; as I read the alphabet a faint line appeared between her eyebrows, and after making me read most of My First Reader and the stock-market quotations from The Mobile Register aloud, she discovered that I was literate and looked at me with more than faint distaste. Miss Caroline told me to tell my father not to teach me any more, it would interfere with my reading.”

“When he finally looked up at me, his eyes were watery. “Every guy at that party had his eyes on you, including me, but I knew I’d never in a million years have a chance with you. I saw you around campus after that and at parties, every once and a while. Every time I saw you, you took my breath away. I couldn’t keep my eyes off of you but you never noticed me. Not that I expected you to. I always knew you were way out of my league. Then last night, you actually looked at me. You talked to me. You flirted with me. I couldn’t believe you wanted to be with me. I knew it was the only chance I’d probably ever have to be with you, even if it was just for one night, so I took it.”