“[N]ames were what you wore forever, and she felt that she'd sent her daughters out in tacky rabbit fur coats when they should have been wrapped in mink.”

“If she'd spaced her children out and had eleven babies in eleven years, she would have been no better than her own mother and sisters: irresponsible, a welfare cheat, another bit of Sawdust Lane white trash. But as luck would have it, she'd had them all at once, and now she was, overnight, middle-class. And respectable.”

“Polly had always marveled . . . that her country would name such a processed and unnatural product [American cheese] after itself, yet hungry Rose . . . gleefully ate every individually wrapped, plastic little one of them.”

“This is what making love must be like, she thinks. At twelve years old, she understands little more than that it will begin with loss - the loss of virginity, the loss of innocence - but that at some point there stands to be a gain.”

“[H]e went ahead and named them without her, pulling from the spiral notebook of names they'd been collecting, putting together first and middle names with no rhyme or reason . . . names that obviously didn't flow.”

“None of her spells are planned, but come to her like snatches of poetry or a doodle on a napkin.”

“He makes her feel halfway normal by being so much further beyond her.”