"The nun's arrived with the man ad his I.V. stand, a new man with no skin or crushed features or all his teeth bashed out, a man who'd be perfect for me. My one true love. My deformed or mutilated or diseased prince charming. My unhappily ever after. My hideous future. The monstrous rest of my life."

"I'm an invisible monster, and I'm incapable of loving anybody. You don't know which is worse."

"Save the world with some advice from the future."

"Jump to the week after Manus's last visit, last meaning final, when Evie drops by the hospital. Evie looks at the glossies and talks to God and Jesus Christ."

"Birds ate my face."

"And the crowd of shoppers is bailed, leaving just us and the security cameras instead of God watching to catch us when we fuck up."

"Give me tolerance."

"When you understand," Brandy says, "that what you're telling is just a story. It isn't happening anymore. When you realize the story you're telling is just words, when you can just crumble it up and throw your past in the trashcan," Brandy says, "then we'll figure out who you're going to be."

"Going outside, the world is all color after the white-on-white of the hospital. It's going over the rainbow. I walk up to a supermarket, and shopping feels like a game I haven't played since I was a little girl. Here are all my favorite name-brand products, all those colors, French's Mustard, Rice A Ronni, Top Ramen, everything trying to catch your attention."

"Vogue on location."

"The fashion photographer inside my head, yells:"

"Just remember, the same spectacular Vogue magazine, remember that no matter how close"

"Don't expect this to be the kind of story that goes: and then, and then, and then."

"Give me attention."

"Give me empathy."

"Anymore, when I see the picture of a twenty-something in the newspaper who was abducted and sodomized and robbed and then killed and here's a front-page picture of her young and smiling, instead of me dwelling on this being a big, sad crime, my gut reaction is, wow, she'd be really hot if she didn't have such a big honker of a nose. My second reaction is I'd better have some good head and shoulder shots handy in case I get, you know, abducted and sodomized to death. My third reaction is, well, at least that cuts down the competition."

"It's all mirror, mirror on the wall because beauty is power the same way a gun is power."

"Haute couture and getting hauter."

"Him yelling, Give me lust, baby."

"This makeover would make piercings and tattoos and brandings look so lame, all those little fashion revolts so safe that they themselves only became fashionable. Those little paper tiger attempts to reject looking good that only end up reinforcing it."

"I wanted the everyday reassurance of being mutilated. The way a crippled deformed birth-defected disfigured girl can drive her car with the windows open and not care how the wind makes her hair look, that's the kind of freedom I was after."

"You know how you look at ugly hunchback girls, and they are so lucky. Nobody drags them out at night so they can't finish their doctorate thesis papers. They don't get yelled at by fashion photographers if they get infected ingrown bikini hairs. You look at burn victims and think how much time they save not looking in mirrors to check their skin for sun damage."

"Be famous. Be a big social experiment in getting what you don't want. Find value in what we've been taught is worthless. Find good in what the world says is evil. I'm giving you my life because I want to whole world to know you. I wish the whole world would embrace what it hates."

"Now," those Plumbago lips say, "You are going to tell me your story like you just did. Write it all down. Tell that story over and over. Tell me your sad-assed story all night." That Brandy queen points a long bony finger at me. "When you understand," Brandy says, "that what your telling is just a story. It isn't happening anymore. When you realize the story you're telling is just words, when you can just crumble it up and throw your past in the trashcan," Brandy says, "then we'll figure out who you're going to be."

"Sorry, mom. Sorry, God."

"Nobody's all-the-way dead yet, but let's just say the clock is ticking."

"Jump to present time with my folks sitting on lawn chairs at night, and watching these same super-8 movies projected on the white side of the same white house, twenty years later. The house the same, the yard the same, the windows projected in the movies lined up just perfect with the real windows, the movie grass aligned with the real grass, and my movie-projected brother and me being toddlers and running around wild for the camera."

"When I met you, I envied you. I coveted your face. I thought that face of yours will take more guts than any sex change operation. It will give you bigger discoveries. It will make you stronger than I could ever be."

"What I wanted looked more and more like what I'd always been trained to want."

"Make me into anything, but just love me."

"People just can't stand not knowing something, she says. Especially men can't stand not climbing every mountain, mapping everywhere. Labeling everything. Peeing on every tree and then never calling you back."

"The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person."

"Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everybody I've ever known."

"Rip yourself open. Sew yourself shut."

"She has to take a needle and thread and sew herself up" ".. The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open"

"You have to keep recycling yourself."

"When we don't know who to hate, we hate ourselves."

"When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?"

"Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education."

"Somewhere in heaven, you're live on a video web site for God to surf."

"Evie says that beautiful people should never date each other. Together, they just don't generate enough attention. Evie says there's a whole shift in the beauty standard when they're together. You can feel this, Evie says. When both of you are beautiful, neither of you is beautiful. Together, as a couple, you're less than the sum of your parts."

"Hysteria is impossible without an audience. Panicking by yourself is the same as laughing alone in an empty room. You feel really silly."

"This is the world we live in. Conditions change and we mutate."

"Besides, it happens fast for some people and slow for some, accidents or gravity, but we all end up mutilated. (ch3p32)"

"The murderer, the victim, the witness, each of us thinks our role is the lead."

"When it's time to reintroduce me to solid foods, their words again, it's pureed chicken and strained carrots. Baby foods. Everything mashed or pulverized or crushed. You are what you eat."

"Another thing is no matter how much you think you love somebody, you'll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close."

"What's burning down is a re-creation of a period revival house patterned after a copy of a copy of a copy of a mock-tudor big manor house. It's a hundred generations removed from anything original, but the truth is aren't we all?"

"Shotgunning anybody in this room would be the moral equivalent of killing a car, a vacuum cleaner, a Barbie doll. Erasing a computer disk. Burning a book. Probably that goes for killing anyone in the world. We're all such products."

"When you go out with a drunk, you'll notice how a drunk fills your glass so he can empty his own. As long as you're drinking, drinking is okay. Two's company. Drinking is fun. If there's a bottle, even if your glass isn't empty, he'll pour a little in your glass before he fills his own."