“I wasn't quick-witted or confident enough to play them at their cruel games. I'd feel the heat rush to my face as I flumbed for a rebuff, and I'd become highly aware of my heavy bottom lip, the position of my hands, of my entire body, and I'd end up looking silly and uneasy. I'd walk away hearing the other girls snigger, and it hurt. I didn't cry, but each time it changed something in me, deep down, shaping who I was and who I would become. Each time less confident yet stronger, more insular yet more self-contained.”

“I feel like the caterpillar that we think is making a choice when he eats or pupates but, in fact, is not. He's ruled by molecular forms of incluence acting on the base components of a moth. Likewise, perhaps I have become a killer through circumstances acting on my biological make-up. Which means, of course, that none of this is my fault and that it's all out of my hands.”

“I wasn't sure who I was most scared of at the moment. The stranger I was learning about too quickly, or the woman I'd known my entire life that was quickly becoming a stranger.”

“Once you decide on the best poison for the termination, you must work out the correct concentration. For instance, I know that five milligrams of cetratranic acid dropped into a bell-jar with a single moth will take about three seconds to stun it. I know that seven milligrams will anaesthetize it and ten is enough to kill it, providing the moth does not weight more than 3.5 grams. I also know that to kill fifty moths you need five times the concentration or volume of killing fluid, but to kill seven thousand you'd need only two hundred times the concentration. I know that potassium chloride could never kill a larger moth and potassium sulphide would only ever be strong enough to anaesthetize it. I know that cyanide kills anything. But what I don't know right now is the precise amount I will need to kill Vivien.”

“Five years, my family thinks it's time I moved on. I'd like to move on with a non-asshole”

“I love her and hate her at the same time. I even love the parts of her that I hate, her vitality and her colour, her disruption and disorder, her humour and her despair, her conceit and her narcissism, her everything that isn't me.”

“My skin tingled a little where she touched me. I was totally aware of that one spot more than I'd been aware of anything in my whole life. I didn't know if I wanted the feeling to go away or to feel it forever.”