We moved together very slowly toward the house, trying to understand its ugliness and ruin and shame.

So long as you write it away regularly nothing can really hurt you.

Am I walking toward something I should be running away from?

in all the world there is not someone who does not believe something.

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all, I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in our family is dead.

We eat the year away. We eat the spring and the summer and the fall. We wait for something to grow and then we eat it.

Let him be wise, or let me be blind; don't let me, she hoped concretely, don't let me know too surely what he thinks of me.