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The only advice the aunts offered was that a baby was easier to prevent than to raise,
Goodness, in their opinion, was not a virtue but merely spinelessness and fear disguised as humility.
She didn’t bother about healthy dinners and mealtimes; she waited until she was starving, then ate canned peas out of the tin as she stood near the sink.
Sally felt as though she’d been dead and now that she was back she was particularly sensitive to the world of the living:
Have finally done it, she’d scrawled in handwriting that was looser than anyone would have expected from someone so orderly. Have tied the sheets together and jumped!
It doesn’t matter what people tell you. It doesn’t matter what they might say. Sometimes you have to leave home. Sometimes, running away means you’re headed in the exact right direction.
“Work is what people have to do in order to have the bucks to party,”
That’s what it felt like sometimes, especially when she’d see a woman who could be herself out in public without fearing that her husband or boyfriend would snap at her. “I told you not to park there,” some woman would say to her husband outside a movie theater or a flea market, and those words would move Gillian to tears. How wonderful to say whatever you wanted without having to go over it in your mind, again and again, to make certain it wouldn’t set him off.
“I don’t think you’re screwed up,” Sally tells her sister. A white lie doesn’t count if you cross your fingers behind your back, or if you tell it so that someone you love will stop crying.
Mr. Frye is watching the ceiling fan as though it were the most fascinating thing on earth. Antonia assumes this has to do with some sort of scientific study of speed or light, but in fact it’s directly related to the experiences of Ben Frye’s youth, when he went out to San Francisco to visit a friend and stayed for nearly ten years, during which time he worked for a rather well-known maker of LSD.
Unrequited love is so boring.
She wishes that she were twelve years old again, and that men didn’t shout out their car windows whenever she walks along the Turnpike about how much they’d like to fuck her.
You can tell just by looking at her that she never backed down or valued anyone’s opinion above her own.
It was a really nice couch, made out of some plum-colored corduroy fabric.
When she stares at herself in the mirror she just can’t decide who she is. If she ever does figure it out, she’ll know whether she should dye her hair blond or brown, but for now, she’s in the middle. She’s in the middle about everything.
She didn’t think she had the luxury to talk back; as far as she knew, nothing was legal.
the lonelier you are, the more you pull away, until humans seem an alien race, with customs and a language you can’t begin to understand.
The spots become clouds, and the clouds rise high, and the only way to get rid of them is to do something. Quite suddenly she knows this. If she doesn’t do something, she could get stuck here. Other girls will continue, they’ll go on and have boyfriends and make mistakes, and she will be exactly the same, frozen. If she doesn’t make a move soon, they’re all going to pass her by and she’ll still be a child, afraid to leave her room, afraid to grow up.
and questioned all three of his alleged friends,
Always throw spilled salt over your left shoulder. Keep rosemary by your garden gate. Add pepper to your mashed potatoes. Plant roses and lavender, for luck. Fall in love whenever you can.
