“I had buried my romance in a bed of asphodel.”

“I lay down on the bed clasping the pictures and buried my face in the pillow in a vain attempt at silencing my sobs. But it was as if all my life's accumulated grief had finally found an outlet and was allowed to take its course. I screamed, I cried, until the grief became bearable. (174)”

“Had I forgotten how to cry? Was that possible? In order to survive, I had long since buried my emotions.”

“The sins of the Midwest: flatness, emptiness, a necessary acceptance of the familiar. Where is the romance in being buried alive? In growing old?”

“. . . the romantic teenager buried deep inside her was weeping at the perversion of her love story. There was no hero in her romance, and the villain made her feel things that she had never imagined she could experience.”

“In my headphones, I led a life of romance and incident and intrigue, none of which had anything to do with the world outside my Walkman.”