“Amelia and I were at the age where wonderful things sometimes still did happen, but far less often than they used to.”

“A life passed amid gangsters, thieves, smugglers, and gamblers had granted Amelia an unerring nose for greed, vanity, and other assorted venal characteristics, and in Miss Sparrow, she smelled rancid pride combined with the bitter char of unrequited love. She smelled the lemon tang of loneliness mingling with despair. Just under Priscilla Sparrow's skin, Amelia could tell, a rosemary blast of judiciousness rippled, followed by the must decay of jealousy and a lingering note of envy - in short (and in spite of all of Miss Sparrow's better attempts with Dick Crane), the odors of a lifelong spinster.”

“I was sixteen and just waking up to the peculiar rules of love - how what's left unsaid between two people can be a far more complicated language than what's written on the page.”

“Of course, this memory makes me sorrowful now, for it anyone ever knew the shape of me, it was Amelia - and not just the outer lines of me, either, but all my innards as well. She was as necessary as the sun to me. She was the quiet heat that shimmered inside my shadow and made it live, and without her, I am a little darker.”

“...Maybe it was just the perfect realization to all ones' dreams....where a magic elixir could heal you and make you strong, where men could make roses bloom with the single touch of a thumb, and where the bigger women were, so much the better.”

“On the face of things, we were hopelessly mismatched, but somehow we fit together perfectly.”

“Even back then, I guess, I suspected that sometimes the only available choice in life is to spit on death and run.”