Rejection is a cancer, Edie. It eats away at a person.

It didn't occur to him that she might have chosen to remain this way. That where he saw reserve and loneliness, Cassandra saw self-preservation and the knowledge that it was safer when one had less to lose.

She was the sort of person for whom fear was the natural response to that beyond explanation.

Thinking of nothing. Trying to think of nothing. Thinking of everything.

I love the structural part of the writing process.

I've heard it said that children born to stressful times never shake the air of woe . . . .

Nell was not one for friends and had never hidden her distaste for most other humans, their neurotic compulsion for the acquisition of allies.