“Good girls don't hurt other people's feelings. Good girls are not overly aggressive, competitive, or boastful. Good girls please others. But what good girls are good for is another question.”

“A girl doesn't need a guy in her life in order to act like a complete idiot. Certainly I, at least, never have.”

“I sobbed for the girl, me, the other girl, the other me, and how he was hurting her - me..."the other girl," I said to her. "It's the other girl, Caroline. Don't let her be alone." (154)”

“Good-humoured, unaffected girls, will not do for a man who has been used to sensible women. They are two distinct orders of being.”

“Everything became a metaphor, a talisman, a sign that I was still actually connected to people—that I wasn’t so completely on my own.”

“I’m aware that there is a bigger, far more complicated world out there than I’d ever realized, and just like the students at Beijing University, I’ve glimpsed it only fleetingly, peripherally. I’ve sensed the vast expanse of my own ignorance now. I feel antsy and constricted and a deep, almost sexual yearning for velocity, for some sort of raw, transcendent experience that I cannot even begin to articulate.”

“That’s my good girl,” he growled in my ear. And there it was. His good girl? Why did I always have to be the good girl? Fuck that.”