“(While interviewing at the Hunan women's prison:)'I have lived with several men, and let them amuse themselves with me. Because of that, I have been sent to two labour reeducation camps and been sentenced to prison twice. (...) When people curse me for having no shame, I don't get angry. All the Chinese care about is "face", but they don't understand how their faces are linked to the rest of their bodies.”

“I would have been here sooner but Lysander held me prisoner in our cloud," Bianka said with a grin. "He wouldn't relent until Sabin gave the ok. Which I still don't understand and will continue to punish him for until he spills. Secrets or guts, I don't care which.”

“I have been attacked by crows and men with grotesque faces; I have been set on fire by the boy who almost threw me off a ledge; I have almost drowned - twice - and this> is what I can't cope with? This is the fear I have no solutions for - a boy I like, who wants to...have sex with me?”

“I'd think, That ain't me, that ain't my face. It wasn't even me when I was trying to be that face. I wasn't even really me then; I was just being the way I looked, the way people wanted. It don't seem like I ever have been me.”

“The people who have adored me-- there have not been very many, but there have been some-- have always insisted on living on, long after I had ceased to care for them, or they to care for me.”

“There is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school. To begin with, it is a prison. But in some respects more cruel than a prison. In a prison, for instance, you are not forced to read books written by the warders and the governor. . . .In the prison you are not forced to sit listening to turnkeys discoursing without charm or interest on subjects that they don't understand and don't care about, and therefore incapable of making you understand or care about. In a prison they may torture your body; but they do not torture your brains.”