“Her name was a joke, she said, like Karen Cutter's family nick-naming her Cookie, or poor Marie Antoinette Jones, whose parents had liked the sound of the name but who were a tad weak in French history.”

“He had a last name for a first name, and a last name for a last name, but only because it came after his first name (the one that sounds like a last name). Otherwise, his last name would sound like a first name.”

“Her delight in the smallest things was like that of a child. There were days when she ran in the garden, like a child of ten, after a butterfly or a dragon-fly. This courtesan who had cost more money in bouquets than would have kept a whole family in comfort, would sometimes sit on the grass for an hour, examining the simple flower whose name she bore.”

“Tennessee. Now there's a name for you. His mama named him that on account of their last name being so regular. 'With a plain vanilla name like Jones, you gotta have a first name that's special,' she'd said.”

“Marie Antoinette. Her last words were,"Pardon me sir. I did not mean to do it,"to a man whose foot she stepped on before she was executed by the guillotine”

“How many times in her thirty years had she heard the same remarks, the same feeble jokes about her name?”