“Blank-slate friendships were thin and temperamental. She knew that. There was no history there to cement people together, for better or worse.”

“Friendship is the only cement that will ever hold the world together.”

“Worse, she already knew that there were bitter people devoted to the morbid ideal of the presutural cannibalism of appeasement that they defined as peace”

“It was true; always had been. Friendships were like marriages in that way. Routines and patterns were poured early and hardened like cement.”

“There is a picture of me in their heads, a picture of someone I don't know yet. She is not the chubby girl with the braces and bad perm. She is not the girl hiding in the bathroom at recess. She is someone new, a blank slate they have named beautiful. That is what I am now: beautiful, with this new body and face and hair and clothes. Beautiful, with this erasing of history.”

“The only question that really counts, must be thins one: are things getting better or are they getting worse?”