“She's packed her topside fundamentals so tight into her low-cut dress that it's only a matter of time before she busts her banks.”

“Her hair is smoldering. Her face was smudged with soot. She had a cut on her arms, her dress was torn, and she was missing a boot. Beautiful.”

“It doesn’t really matter [if she ever wears the dress], as long as she loves it. She’ll wear it a hundred times in her imagination before she even tries it on again. As long as she has the option of wearing it, she’ll be happy.”

“She smoothes the front of the dress, looking down at her hands, at her bitten fingernails, at her big feet in the pointy-toes shoes. This is a woman's dress, she thinks, a young woman's dress. It is not a girl's dress. It is solidly on the other side of the line outside of girlhood. It is a dress that says something big in a very quiet way; it is a dress that is talking to Alice right now, a dress that is making her feel possibilities never before considered, the possibility of perfume and pretty and dancing and boys. This dress is who she might be, only more so.”

“It was only later, in her new, darker rooms above the banking house, that she realized it didn’t matter how loud she screamed or how violently she wept. Her parents would never come to her because, being dead, they didn’t care anymore.”

“Joan Finch is tall and sickly thin. She is wearing a tight black dress that accentuates her bony legs, the crookedness of her body. She looks like a burnt matchstick.”