“She didn't like to be alone. Even more, she didn't like being with people. (148)”

“Carmen didn't like change, and she certainly didn't like endings.”

“She didn't like being twelve. It felt like someplace between who she'd been and who she was about to be. It felt like no place at all.”

“She was also, by the standards of other people, lost. She would not see it like that. She knew where she was, it was just that everywhere else didn't.”

“Not funny, not funny says she, didn't like it!”

“People didn't change. they liked what they liked even if they didn't understand why.”

“She didn't love him and he didn't love her; she was like an addiction, and what they were doing had a darkness to it, a weight.”

“I didn't even know why I liked her. She was just there. I was used to her.”

“You didn't get past something like that, you go through it -- and for that reason alone, I understood more about her than she ever would have guessed.”

“She was saying goodbye and she didn't even know it.”