“The only thing that separated the so-called real world from high school was a locker combination”

“Here's to our enduring sisterhood. May it bind us together more tightly that the Lycra in my Spanx underpants.”

“Most people felt lost after high school. Sometimes I felt like I'd never really been found in the first place.”

“I stared at the pictogram of a burger nestled between similar representations of shakes, sodas, and fries, on the front of my register. I wondered why humankind seemed so dead set on destroying all of its accomplishments. We draw on cave walls, spend thousands of years developing complex language systems, the printing press, computers, and what do we do with it? Create a cash register with the picture of a burger on it, just in case the cashier didn't finish the second grade. One step forward, two steps back-- like an evolutionary cha-cha. Working here just proved that the only thing separating me from a monkey was pants.”

“It's as if they have thinner boundaries separating them from other people's emotions and from the tragedies and cruelties of the world.”

“Sometimes it seemed like the truth was a bandy-legged soul who dashed from one side of the world to the other and I could never find him.”

“...since I was a little boy, she had always wanted me to go. She was always sending me off on a bus someplace, to elementary school, to camp, to relatives in Kentucky, to college. She pushed me away from her just as she'd pushed my elder siblings away when we lived in New York, literally shoving them out the front door when they left for college. ”