‘Poets love love, do they not? They love describing, deconstructing, cornering, hi-jacking, naming, owning.’

‘They have come to find joy, create explosions and reach ecstasy. The circle throbs with the pulse of shared expectations.’

‘My memory isn’t a yard of film I can roll out and re-examine at will; it’s amorphous, immaterial, and in a state of active decay.’

‘She didn’t look like herself, though that couldn’t be helped; the amount of makeup on her face was enough to morph anyone’s features.’

‘People watch from the shore, waving and laughing like nothing is wrong. Like she belongs in the sea.’

‘You waited 48 hours to go to the police. It took you that long to decide it was a crime, even if it would be called a domestic one, as if it were baked in the oven and smelled like apple crisp.’

‘How, she wonders, did she end up here? Different from her mother, but somehow exactly the same.’

‘She was not allowed to give up. She was programmed for success. She could not process a future without success.’

‘She considered telling Kayleigh about her obsession with Olive Oatman. How the tattoo made her feral, and how much Ellen wanted that for herself too.’

‘My mother always said that mingling too much with boys was dangerous. It could cause an accident and tarnish a girl’s life for good.’

‘In those spaces between their whispering mouths, I led a love life like nobody I’d ever known.’

‘For the first time in the two months since he moved there and since Sarla's demise, he found himself awakened by a new sense of purpose.’

‘Martina leaned down into her bag and pulled out a pair of vivid blue surgical gloves. She pulled them over her sinewy hands, knuckles bulging against the latex.’

‘The showers will come in installments, unloading themselves from black clouds on one village at a time. They will embrace me and my mother river too.’

‘Evie’s disturbed by the glint of the blue bottle from where the bathroom door hangs ajar. She folds the newspaper and swallows, feeling its accusation lodge in her throat.’

‘She wades in and floats on her back and waves of forgetting wash her clean. It’s a good dream.’

‘I’m only a kid though. Only a kid, that’s all.’

‘You said the perfect thing that made me feel safe and loved and comfortable and forever. And I can’t remember what it was.’

‘This was the part of new romance that Layla loved—the part when she felt like a dog chasing a car, when all she wanted was a short, intense burst of closeness.’

‘Our society is so hell-bent on understanding the psychology behind the individual that we can’t even look our bully in the eye and get the revenge that we’ve been dreaming up for years and years.’