“It was completely impossible to box with her. She had only one style, which we called Terminator Mode. She would try to nail her opponent, and it didn’t matter if it was just a warm-up of friendly sparring.”

“Pam wasn't what Gloria would have called a friend, just someone she had known for so long that she had given up trying to get rid of her.”

“One of the things I liked about her [Dorothy] was that she had long fingernails that she would carefully manicure and paint to fit her mood. If she were in a happy mood, her nails would be bright red. If she were feeling like she wanted to eviscerate her mother she would paint her nails burgundy.”

“She seemed to still be completely unaware that Elliot was pining openly for her and messing up customers' orders as a result. And the one time I'd tried to hint to her that there might be dating prospects with someone she already knew, someone she was friends with, she'd thought I was trying to set her up with Warren, and things had briefly gotten very uncomfortable.”

“She was trying to say something else; she was trying to say that the inability to articulate what one feels in any satisfactory way is one of our enduring tragedies. It wouldn't have been much, and it wouldn't have been useful, but it would have been something that reflected the gravity and the sadness inside her. Instead, she had snapped at him for being a loser. It was as if she were trying to find a handhold on the boulder of her feelings, and had merely ended up with grit under her nails.”

“She had spent days balancing on the edge of a choice. A choice, she had suddenly realized, that was never truly a matter of selection. It was what Damien had seemed to know from the start. The only choice she could make was to ignore the demands of her heart and her spirit, both of which she had tried to ignore no matter how loudly they had screamed at her. In truth, there was no choice. She was meant to be his, and he was meant to be hers. She had searched day after day for outside proof of this, only to realize that there was none, and never would be. The proof was stamped in the desires of her soul. It was the instinct that had been born in her, flipped on like a switch, the moment it had flipped on as brilliantly in him. Only he had seen the light, and she had been blinded by it.”