“The last book, the one on the bottom, was a copy of the 1,500-page Gray’s Anatomy. The weight was all wrong in her hands. She opened the cover, revealing a space hollowed out with surgical precision.”

“It is Vesalius' Anatomy of Birth -- a book of drawings and diagrams of human anatomy. Beautiful drawings but -- as the pages turn -- terrible in their frankness…”

“Alright, Macy Gray….. what exactly is wrong with her? She, for sure has a little mental retardation. Allegedly!”

“But what happens when her beauty is torn from her like a cover from a book? Will he care to read her then, although her pages speak of nothing but love for him?”

“A fool puts her hand into a hollow tree without finding out what’s inside first.”

“(a picture of)a naked woman, although she was covering her pubis with her right hand and her breasts with her left. _ _ _ _ covering yourself up like that is worse than showing everything”

“The girl dreams she is dangerously ill. Suddenly birds come out of her skin and cover her completely… Swarms of gnats obscure the sun, the moon, and all the stars except one. That one start falls upon the dreamer.”

“She was so open and frank… She made space around her, if we just behaved… Everybody seemed to trust this woman and gathered gladly around her.”

“Eleanor Roosevelt, fine, precise, hand-worked like ivory. Her voice was almost attractive … One had the impression of a lady who was finally becoming a woman, which is to say that she was just a little bitchy about it all; nice bitchy, charming, it had a touch of art to it, but it made one wonder if she were not now satisfying the last passion of them all, which was to become physically attractive, for she was better-looking than she had ever been.”

“I wanted to pull down a book, open it proper, and gobble up page after page”