“I don't answer. I shut my eyes and hold my breath and hope whoever it is will think I'm not here and go home.”

“Money is a tremendous advantage in just about everything, but in terms of reproduction, if you're a poor woman and you are infertile, it's like too bad, so sad. And if you are a wealthy woman, you can kind of buy whatever you want.”

“If there had been an exercise I'd liked, would I have gotten this big in the first place?”

“If a writer writes poems and short stories and novels, but nobody ever reads them, is she really a writer?”

“Tell the story that's been growing in your heart, the characters you can't keep out of your head, the tale story that speaks to you, that pops into your head during your daily commute, that wakes you up in the morning.”

“Sometimes I wish it has been you.”

“First of all, it's life. You don't win.”

“I don't answer. I shut my eyes and hold my breath and hope whoever it is will think I'm not here and go home.”

“It was high school. Evil is kind of the name of the game.”

“I'm saying that it's a big decision. Your first love is important. It's part of your story The story you'll tell yourself, the one you'll tell about yourself, for the rest of your life.”

“Rose leaned against the bathroom door. Here it was — her real life, the truth of who she was, barreling down on her like a bus with bad brakes. Here was the truth — she wasn’t the kind of person Jim could fall in love with. She wasn’t what she’d made herself out to be — a cheerful, uncomplicated girl, a normal girl with a happy, orderly life, a girl who wore pretty shoes and had nothing more pressing on her mind that whether ER was a rerun this week. The truth was in the exercise tape she didn’t have time to unwrap, let alone exercise to; the truth was her hairy legs and ugly underwear. Most of all, the truth was her sister, her gorgeous, messed-up, fantastically unhappy and astoundingly irresponsible sister.”