I'm a liar. And I can't stop thinking about boys.

She would be no one if that was what it took. No one had no holes inside her.

... she starched and ironed her face, forming it into just what people wanted to see ...

I am stained with corrupt splendor, I am a code for obscure secrets, I am a being apart, I was born in decadence, and I live over the water. I am as different as possible from you, and yet I am not...

Cut! Changes happen to people. But there is a face we sometimes have that hides itself.

All right, then, her first rule for the rest of her days: no more looking outside for definitions. She might not have any clue who she was, but better to be lost and searching than shoved into a...

Love is a word, another kind of open. As the diamond comes into a knot of flame I am Black because I come from the earth's inside take my word for jewel in the open light.

At twenty - two, I had the callowest possible definition of interesting and, by the measure of my own calipers, was far from interesting myself.

I, Anna Maria de Burgh Coppinger Isis solemnly swear on

A bastard son must fight his own way in the world. Osferth knew that.

By the time we hit the streets they were silent and closed in on us, and they had assumed the Nonchalant Look, an expression that said, I am not a nurse escorting six lunatics to the ice cream parlor....

"Who are you?' he asked suddenly. 'I'm not sure,' replied the other. 'I rather think I am your long-lost brother."

Miriam came to consider Eliza a gosling born into a family of ducks, loved and accepted, but always and forever a goose.

You can do terrible things when you don't know who you are...

"Same here, Cap'n," Amos said. "I got a lot of past in my past."

I'd never been much of an athlete, due to a physical condition I'd had since birth {unathleticism}. Perhaps if there were a sport centered around lying on your couch in a neurotic stupor all day, I'd...

In the prosperous household of Sylvie's childhood, Cook was called 'Cook' but Mrs Glover preferred 'Mrs Glover'. It made her irreplaceable. Sylvie still stubbornly referred to her as Cook.

I shall be dark and French and fashionable and difficult. And you shall be sweet and open and English and fair. What a pair we shall be! What man can resist us?

Our contradictions are never so to ourselves.

I told her that what was most important to me was not whether she loved a man or a woman, but that she loved and was loved well - that she experience passion, and the wonderful surprise of finding...

My name is Sam Cortland … and I will not be afraid. I've been doing it for years.

It's true I'm male and have some power, but I never asked to be born male. Maybe being male is like being born a predator, and maybe the only right thing for the predator to do, if it sympathizes with...

It was, in part, a longing – common enough among the inventors of heroes – to be someone else; to be more than the result of two hundred regimens and scenarios and self-improvement campaigns that...

whisper about, the one who finds out years later, just by accident, that she is not herself at all.

You're sort of like the Paris Hilton of wine, Martin had offered. She'd nearly keeled over in horror.

You cannot say to the sun, or to the rain, To a man, geisha can only be half a wife. We are the wives of nightfall. And yet, to learn kindness after so much unkindness, to understand that a little...

You do know, right, that between the no-longer and the still-to-come you are being continually tattooed, inked with the skulls of everyone you've ever loved—the you & the you & the you & the...

... a man knows when he is growing old because he begins to look like his father.

Perhaps the picture that had their own family was too mixed with their hopes and fears so that they could ever see you as the person you were.

It'll be no use their putting their heads down and saying "Come up again, dear!"I shall only look up and say "Who am I then? Tell me that first, and then,if I like being that person, I'll come up: if...