“Cora didn't know what optimistic meant. She asked the other girls that night if they were familiar with the word. None of them had heard it before. She decided that it meant trying.”

“When I first heard the word existential, I didn't know what it meant. But then I found out that no one knows what it means, so now I use it all the time.”

“Words, he decided, were inadequate at best, impossible at worst. They meant too many things. Or they meant nothing at all.”

“Sexuality is not meant to be this way - an honest, consensual expression in which a girl might take an active role when she feels good and ready and not one minute before. No. Sexual desire is meant to sell soap. And cars. And beer. And religion.”

“A wise girl knows her limits, a smart girl knows that she has none.”

“Some parents just work at…I don't know…Microscoft (She mispronounced the word. She meant Microsoft) and just sit there at a desk and their kids have to sit at a desk, too and…I don't know!”

“At this Helen laughed outright. "Nonsense," she said. "You're not a Christian. You've never thought what you are.—And there are lots of other questions," she continued, "though perhaps we can't ask them yet." Although they had talked so freely they were all uncomfortably conscious that they really knew nothing about each other.
"The important questions," Hewet pondered, "the really interesting ones. I doubt that one ever does ask them."
Rachel, who was slow to accept the fact that only a very few things can be said even by people who know each other well, insisted on knowing what he meant.
"Whether we've ever been in love?" she enquired. "Is that the kind of question you mean?"”

“Wo ai ni, Tessa,” he whispered. “Wo bu xiang shi qu ni.” She knew, without knowing how she knew, what the words meant. I love you. And I don’t want to lose you.”

“She will remain sane and she will live as she was meant to live, richly and deeply, among others of her kind, in full possession and command of her gifts.”

“She [Cleopatra] was then a very young girl, but had already begun to look upon the world as a mean, dark place, in which fortune and brightness were to be had only be seizing from others what one could and keeping it in one’s hold as long as possible. Believing that there were not enough desirable things for all to have share in them, she made up her mind that the happiest person was the one who was the cleverest thief. She worked with vicious fanaticism to have what she coveted; thinking that none knew so well as herself the joy of possessing and none therefore deserved so much. When she had won her way she softened as a goddess to mortals—pouring out affection and benevolence with an abandon that was unmatchable and frightening, but irresistible. Then she was happy, and felt virtuous.”