DARK PLACES - GILLIAN FLYNN

Dark Places -Pg 331

   I knew that's what I needed to do, but my brain was infected with memories of what happened after my family was murdered: the long, washed-out hours going over and over my story with the police, my legs hanging off oversized chairs, cold hot chocolate in styrofoam cups, me unable to get warm, just wanting to go to sleep, that total exhaustion, where even your face is numb. And you can say all you want, it doesn't matter because everyone's dead anyway. 

Dark Places -Pg 315

   She fed me a salty pot roast that I tried to swallow and a lot of pink wine from a box that seemed to have no bottom. We didn't sip, we drank. My kind of women. 

Dark Places -Pg 314

I couldn't think what to say. I just felt a relief. The Days weren't quite dying out yet. They were in fact flourishing, with this pretty, tall girl who looked like me but with all her fingers and toes without my nightmare brain. I wanted to ask a flood of nosy questions: Did she have weak eyes, like Michelle? Was she allergic to strawberries like my mom? Did she have sweet blood, like Debby, get eaten alive by mosquitos, spend the summer stinking of Campho-Phenique? Did she have a temper, like me, a distance like Ben? Was she manipulative and guiltless like Runner? What was she like, what was she like, tell me the many ways she was like the Days, and remind me of how we were.

Dark Places -Pg 299

   They should have stopped early on with the drugs. It was cheap stuff, he could tell by how much it all hurt, even the weed went down fighting, like it was out to damage. It was the cheap stuff that made people mean. 

Dark Places -Pg 298

 He flicked his lighter to one side, and WHOOMP! the clothes fired up, making Trey stumble back two big steps, almost fall. It was the first time Ben had seen him look foolish. Diondra turned away, not wanting to embarrass Trey by seeing it. That made Ben more sad than anything else tonight: the woman he wanted to be his wife, the woman who'd have his child, she'd give this bit of grace to another man, but never, ever to Ben.

Dark Places -Pg 285

   If I were a better person, I'd have put my hand on Lyle's then, given him a warm squeeze, let him know I understood, I empathized. But I wasn't, the thanks was hard enough. 

Dark Places -Pg 278

 His eyes still had the druggy glow, and Ben wished he'd taken more of the Devil's rush, wished he wasn't jammed in this between state, where he had some logic but no fear. 

Dark Places -Pg 276

   Suddenly Diondra and Trey were grabbing his hands, Trey's grip tight and hot, Diondra's limp, sticky, as they stood in a circle around their weapons. The moonlight was making everything glow. Diondra's face looked like a mask, all hollows and hills, and when she thrust her chin up toward the moon, and between her open mouth and the pile of metal Ben got a hard-on and didn't care.

Dark Places -Pg 275

 And then as soon as he thought he needed a gun, shoot himself and end this, came a big air bubble of relief that spread through him, soothed his veins, and he realized he'd been holding his breath and started gulping air, and then felt fucking good. Fucking smart to breathe air, that's what it was. He felt he was expanding, turning big, undeniable. Like no matter what he did, it was the right choice, yes sir, sure thing, like he could line up all the skyful of choices he'd need to make in the coming months and he could shoot them down like carnival animals and win something big. Huge. Hurray for Ben, up on everyone's shoulders so the world can fucking cheer. 

Dark Places -Pg 261

   Patty's head was heavy, she willed herself not to move. She would just keep her head right there, on the desk, until someone told her what to do. She was good at this, she sometimes sat for hours without leaving a chair, her head bobbing like a nursing-home inmate, thinking about her childhood, when her parents had their list of chores for her, and told her when to go to bed and when to get up and what to do during the day, and no one ever asked her to decide things. 

Dark Places -Pg 247

 The sky was draining quickly now, the horizon just a cuticle of pink. I realized I was humming "Uncle John's Band" to myself for no good reason. 

Dark Places -Pg 219

   "You all redheads?" Collins said. "Where's the red come from, you Irish?" 

   Patty thought immediately of her always-conversation with Len about their red hair, and then she thought, The farm's going away. How did I forget that the farm's going away?

Dark Places -Pg 216

 "You know, you all want it to be real, so someone moves the heart-thingie a little and you know someone's moving it, but part of you thinks maybe it's real, it's really a ghost, and no one has to say anything, you just all kind of know you've agreed to believe."

Dark Places -Pg 212

   She kept talking like that, adding a sentence and then another, without asking to be let in, and that was probably why I decided to let her in.

Dark Places -Pg 209

 That's how I felt now, like I'd been sawing away at something and come to the end and here I was by myself again, in my small house with no job, no family, and I was holding two ends of fabric and didn't know what to do next. 

Dark Places -Pg 193

   I'd have never thought of Yellow 5 again without Ben reminding me. I wanted to tell him to make a list of things to recall, memories I couldn't pluck out of my brain on my own. 

Dark Places -Pg 179

   They walked into pure din. Michelle was trying to fry salami strips on the skillet, screaming at Debby to go away. Libby had a splatter of bright pink burns up one arm and a cheek where the grease had hit her, and was sitting on the floor, mouth wide, crying the way Patty had just been crying in the car: as if there was absolutely no hope, and even if there was, she wasn't up to the challenge. 

Dark Places -Pg 154

   She never wrote Mommy, I thought, we never called her that even as kids. I want my mommy, I thought. We never said that. I want my mom. I felt something loosen in me, that shouldn't have loosened. A stitch come undone. 

Dark Places -Pg 145

   Patty wondered how many hours she and Diane had spent rumbling around in cars together: a thousand? Two thousand? Maybe if you added it all up, a sum total of two years, put end to end, the way mattress companies did: You spend a third of your life asleep, why not do it on a ComfortCush? Eight years standing in lines, they say. Six years peeing. Put like that, life was grim. Two years waiting in the doctor's office, but a total of three hours watching Debby at breakfast laughing until milk started dribbling down her chin. Two weeks eating soppy pancakes her girls made for her, the middle still sour with batter. Only one hour staring in amazement as Ben unconsciously tucked his baseball cap behind his ears in a gesture mirror-perfect to what his grandpa did. 

Dark Places -Pg 132

   Ben worked the music in his head, his brain sizzling, feeling angry-frantic, the way he always did to metal, the guitar strum never letting up, bundling him tensed and tensed, bumping his head up and down, the drums shooting up his spine, the whole thing this rage-frenzy, not letting him think straight, just keeping him in a tight shake. His whole body felt like a cocked fist, ready for release.

Dark Places -Pg 111

 I drove home to Over There That Way, pulled up my slope of a hill, got out, and stared at the two old ladies across the street who'd never look at me. They sat on the porch swing as always, despite the chill, their heads rigidly straight, lest I muddy their view. I stood with my hands on my hips, on top of my hill, and waited until one finally caved. Then I waved rather grandly, an Old West corral sort of wave. The wrinkled biddy nodded at me, and I went inside and fed poor Buck, feeling a bubble of triumph. 

Dark Places -Pg 99

   I tried to find that bunny in my memory, tried to inventory the bathroom and the things in it, but I came out with nothing, a handful of water.

Dark Places -Pg 97

 "Are they treating you OK." I asked, stupidly, my eyes glazed, and suddenly I was crying and all I wanted to say was sorryI'msorryI'msosorry. Instead I said nothing, looking only at a constellation of acne scattered around one corner of Ben's lips.

Dark Places -Pg 95

 The looping wire reminded me of the phone cord that Ben and my mom always fought over toward the end, the one eye were always tripping on. Debby was cremated with a little starburst scar on her wrist because of that goddang phone cord. I made myself cough loudly, just to hear something. 

Dark Places -Pg 85

   From kindergarten through eighth grade, he'd gone to Kinnakee Grade School; he had more connection with that side of the building than the high school side where he stood now, pieces of its refuse stuck to him.

Dark Places -Pg 79

 He'd been a poor, quiet farm boy, who hung out with other farm kids in an unnoticed corner of the school. They weren't dorky enough to be actually reviled; they were never picked on. They were the background noise of high school.

Dark Places -Pg 79

 Diondra was a strange one, not really preppy--she was too flashy and wild to fit in that crowd--but not entirely in the metal crowd, either, even though she blared Iron Maiden and loved leather and smoked tons of weed. Diondra wasn't in any clique, she was just the New Girl. Everyone knew her but didn't at the same time. 

Dark Places - Pg 72

   "I guess I didn't realize that all of us had our own theories, uh, but none of them included Ben being guilty. I didn't think it through. And I didn't realize. I didn't take into account. Just. You know, this is real to you. I mean, I know that, we know that, but we don't at the same time. We really just never will. I don't think. Totally get that. You spend so much time discussing and debating it becomes... But. Well. I'm sorry."

Dark Places - Pg 71

 The two most powerful Satanists had tire-streak eyeliner and black robes and pentagrams around their necks, but they were sitting in their living room, on a cheap velveteen couch, and you could just see into the kitchen on the right, where a yellow refrigerator hummed on a cheery linoleum floor. I could picture them after the interview, rummaging through the fridge for tuna salad and a Coke, their capes getting in the way.

Dark Places - Pg 71

   I'd once been to Chicago, seen Lincoln's death artifacts in a museum: thatches of his hair; bullet fragments; the skinny spindle bed he'd died on, the mattress still slouched in the middle like it knew to preserve his last imprint. I ended up running to the bathroom, pressing my face against the cold stall door to keep from swooning. What would the Day death house look like, if we reunited all its relics, and who would come to see it? How many bundles of my mother's blood-stuck hair would be in the display cabinet? What happened to the walls, smeared with those hateful words, when our house was torn down? Could we gather a bouquet of frozen reeds where I'd crouched for so many hours? Or exhibit the end of my frostbitten finger? My three gone toes?

Dark Places - Pg 70

 If I was really going to take this on, if I was really going to think about the murders after all these careful years spent doing just the opposite, I needed to be able to look at basic household possessions without panicking: our old metal egg-beater that sounded like sleigh bells when you turned it fast enough, bent knives and forks that had been inside my family's mouths, a coloring book or two with defined crayoned borders if it was Michelle's, bored horizontal scrawls if it was mine. Look at them, let them just be objects.

Dark Places - Pg 68

 As a teenage girl, hair shooting from her ponytail like fireworks, she was the definition of nice looking, the kind of person who reminds you of a neighbor or an old babysitter you always liked.

Dark Places - Pg 65

 Just last summer, some farmer down near Ark City had his hopper go screwy. Dumped 4,000 pounds of wheat on him. This six-foot man, he drowned in it. Suffocated before they could get him out, like choking on sand. Everyone in Kinnakee was so mournful--so regretful about this freak accident--til they found out the man's farm was going under. Then all of a sudden, it was: Well, he should have been more careful. Lectures on taking proper care of equipment, being safe. They turned on him that fast, this poor dead man with lungs full of his own harvest.

Dark Places - Pg 56

   She didn't really seem to listen; she was tuned to her own inner radio station. Something light jazz.

Dark Places - Pg 55

 I looked for liquor bottles but couldn't spot any. There were definitely some pills being swallowed here though. Everything just plinked off this woman--bing, bang!--like she was shellacked.

Dark Places - Pg 55

 No Internet, no cable. I'm not good at things like that: haircuts or oil changes or dentist visits. When I moved into my bungalow, I spent the first three months swaddled in blankets because I couldn't deal with getting the gas turned on. It's been turned off three times in the past few years, because sometimes I can't quite bring myself to write a check. I have trouble maintaining.

Dark Places - Pg 51

 Earp himself made no impression on me, but I adored those Old West villains, with their dripping mustaches and slouchy clothes and eyes that glowed like nickel. An outlaw was always described as "a liar and a thief." And there, in one of those inside-smelling rooms, the file clerk droning on about the art of archiving, I jiggled with the good cheer of meeting a fellow traveler. Because I thought, "That's me."

Dark Places - Pg 46

 She was a girl who liked big reactions, Diondra. She was a screamer, a weeper, a howler when she laughed. She made her eyes go wide, her brows almost up to her hairline when she wanted to seem surprised. She liked to jump out from behind doors and scare him so he'd pretend to chase her. Diondra, his girl with the name that made him think of princesses or strippers, he wasn't sure which. She was a little of both: rich but sleazy.

Dark Places - Pg 32

 It was a blush of love: my dead people were the best. I had a flash of my mother, her red hair tied back in a ponytail, helping me tug off my flimsy winter boots, and then rubbing my toes one by one. Warming up big to, warming up baby toe. In this memory, I could smell buttered toast, but I don't know if there was buttered toast. In this memory I still had all my toes.

Dark Places - Pg 29

 The men were not attractive either. There were whiskery, professorial fellows; nondescript, suburban-dad types; and a goodly amount of guys in their twenties with cheap haircuts and math-nerd glasses, men who reminded me of Lyle and the guy who'd led me downstairs. Unremarkable, but with a brainy arrogance wafting from them. Call it AP aftershave.

Dark Places - Pg 28

   I thought about retreating right then, but the nastiness reared up in me when I pictured this guy, this fucking Renaissance Fest juggler, going down and telling his friends: She freaked, she just ran away! And them all laughing and feeling tough. And him adding: She's really different from what I thought she'd be. And holding his hand up about yay-high to show how little I'd stayed. Fuckyoufuckyoufuckyou, I chanted, and followed him.

Dark Places - Pg 27

 The ceiling had once been painted with a mural--vague, chipped images of country boys and girls hoeing or digging. One girl, her face now vanished, looked like she might be holding a jump rope. Or a snake? The entire western corner of the ceiling had caved in at some point: where the mural's oak tree should have exploded into green summer leaves, there was instead a patch of blue night sky. I could see the glow of the moon but not the moon itself.

Dark Places - Pg 21

 Every morning she'd crick herself down onto the flimsy rug by her bed and pray, but it was actually a promise: Today I won't yell, I won't cry, I won't clench up into a ball like I am waiting for a blow to level me. I will enjoy today.

Dark Places - Pg 3

   My neighborgood doesn't even have a name, it's so forgotten. It's called Over There That Way. A weird, subprime area, full of dead ends and dog crap.

Dark Places - Pg 2

 "Did she want to be buried or cremated?" people would ask. "Who should come to the funeral?" And no one would know. The people, whoever they were, would just look at each other's shoes or shoulders until the silence settled in and then someone would put on a pot of coffee, briskly and with a fair amount of clatter. Coffee goes great with sudden death.

ASTONISH ME - MAGGIE SHIPSTEAD

Astonish Me - Pg 257

 She must be a real dancer, this girl. She had the cursedness, the insatiability, the doom. Other girls, many girls, have wanted him, but their desire was always playful or sultry. Her desire was like a whip at her back. When he looked into her eyes, he could see she was suffering from it, the wanting, and for a moment, they understood each other. Tu m'étonnes, she said. You astonish me.

Astonish Me - Pg 252

   At the end of the act, he dances alone, the speed and difficulty of his steps increasing as he goes. His concentration is so absolute, his body so close to the breaking point, that darkness contracts around him. There is nothing outside himself. He turns grandes pirouettes a la seconde at center stage, spotting off a red light at the back of the theater. Somewhere his parents are sitting together, watching him. His head whips around and around. Sweat flies from him like spray from a fountain. He can't turn anymore, but he does, his stomach and back aching, his leg burning. His lungs, which have always looked after themselves, now need to be reminded--ordered--to fill with air, then begged to fill again, one more time. What confusion of fate and electricity will one day tell his heart to stop? Could you live forever if you had enough will? He turns and turns until his leg drops of its own accord to retiré and he is spun through two final rotations before he falls to his knees and the lights go off. The fall is planned, but he would not be able to stay on his feet anyway. A breath, and then the applause crashes onto his back as the curtain comes down. He gets to his feet; the curtain flies up, and he bows. He can see the conductor, a few rows of faces, and then nothing, a roaring emptiness. He bows again.

Astonish Me - Pg 249

 "Nothing has changed," he told Jacob a thousand futile times. "Please, Dad, don't let things change. I'll never think of anyone but you as my father.
   "Please still be proud of me," Harry had begged. "Please."
   And that plea was why Jacob had endured the news that Arslan and Harry were going to appear together on 60 Minutes to tell their story, why he had tried not to be demolished by Harry's participation in this ballet, why he had taken Harry to the Bahamas after Chloe and Arslan had gotten married and kept him company while he stared at the ocean in silence, why he didn't miss his flight, and why he is now sitting in the dark with thousands of glittering people waiting to see his own life be danced by a man name Georges Lazaresco.

Astonish Me - Pg 247

   "I know why you married me," he told her later, following her up the stairs. "Because I have dark eyes. Because I'm not tall. Because you knew you could pass his son off as mine."
   Joan stopped and turned, slowly, deliberately, her elegant head swiveling on her slender neck, and the grace that had once made him proud now made him want to sweep her feet violently out from under her. "I married you," she said, "because I wanted a life with you."

Astonish Me - Pg 244

 Then he is though the airport, and a taxi is pulling him past the deteriorating flying saucers of the World's Fair, past row houses and a cemetery and neighborhoods that mean nothing to him, over the Queensboro Bridge among secretive Town Cars, Midtown standing up like a waiting bully. Then a rushed shower, three attempts before his bow tie is tied, cursing his clumsy fingers and his sweating, miserable face in the mirror, wishing  for Joan to help him, remembering not to wish for Joan. A minibar bottle of Jim Beam, and he hurries through the city with all the other hurrying people.

Astonish Me - Pg 244

   The plane's engine is the audible rush of hours passing, time pushing him to New York even as he braces against it. He tries not to think, only to surrender to the flow of obligation.

Astonish Me - Pg 242

 She wonders if their shared childhood, spent hearing bizarre stories of love and devastation and enchantment, women dying from heartbreak, women turning into birds, prepared them for the tangling of their lives, if this ballet is a form of therapy.

Astonish Me - Pg 241

   Chloe feels the presence of Arslan's body as if it were her own ghost. She won't disrupt her form to look down, but she is peripherally aware of his leg in black sweats sliding out and in, out and in. When they turn to face the other way, she listens to him breathing behind her, the scrape of his slippers on the floor. In the mirror on the far wall, she sees his face over her shoulder and knows from his inward look that he is not aware of her in the same way. He focuses on his dancing so completely that there is no room for anything else.

Astonish Me - Pg 239

 They must know it's true. Neither had laughed. The man had said No, but more like someone who sees the reaper sliding in under the door than someone who disbelieves.

Astonish Me - Pg 238

   The look Arslan and Chloe give each other is full of the kid of solidarity that can only come from love and conspiracy, if those are two things and not one. She sees they have already thought of a solution to this problem.

Astonish Me - Pg 232

   "Oh, Chloe," he says, putting an arm around her shoulders. His grasp is gentle, but she can feel his strength. "You make me so sad. We are both sad tonight. Okay. Come with me anyway. We need someone to keep us company. I have a guest room. I have milk and cookies."
   She wants to be proud, to say no. At least she wants to ask why he has suddenly focused on her, but she knows if his answer is not perfect (and what would the perfect answer be?), she will have to go home to her cheap futon in her tiny bedroom partitioned from a windowless corner of her shared apartment. So instead she asks, "Why are you sad?"
   "I am sad because I am an old man, and nobody wants to sleep with me. And because I am Russian, and we are always sad late at night."

Astonish Me - Pg 225

   Then they are in their seats, and the back of Arslan's head, his real head, the head she has held between her hands, is six rows up, tilting sometimes to catch whatever the woman beside him is saying, and then he is a precisely identified bit of darkness that never fades into the rest of the darkness as the gala begins, never stops itching at her attention.

Astonish Me - Pg 221

 Her body is rigid, but at least that makes her easy to lift. He practically tosses her up into the air. From her new height, she glowers at the audience, at Harry in it. She is not a fairy; she is an avenging angel. The counterfeit sparkling, smiling prettiness she has worked so hard to stick to herself like sugar has been swept away. She knows what she is doing is wrong for her role, and she feels sorry for her cavalier, but she is burning. The consuming pain she felt after her father died had burrowed into her center and still smolders there like a coal fire. In New York, the teachers told her to try not to feel, to just work with the music, or to think of the movements as cold, crisp tasks her body must carry out. But she can't. Feeling is what allows her to dance at all.

Astonish Me - Pg 209

   When Joan reads in the newspaper how thousands of people were arrested for looting and arson and running wild in the dark streets, how people ripped the grates off storefronts with chains attached to the bumpers of cars and smashed the windows and took everything inside, how muggers mugged one another, stole what had already been stolen, she is not surprised. Darkness is permission, if you want it to be.

Astonish Me - Pg 197

 He sees his arms and legs, the sweat on his face, Arslan moving toward the other side of the room, and, ghosted over all of it, he sees himself and Chloe as they had been on the floor. They were so used to watching themselves in the mirror, neither could keep from looking. In sex, as they never would in dance, they had looked perfect.

Astonish Me - Pg 196

 He knows he could not replicate the feat, not for a million dollars, but somehow that time when Chloe flew at him, eyes blazing in her tiny face, he had snatched her out of the air in a perfect fish dive, as good as the Russians', maybe better, maybe more ferocious and brilliant and dangerous. After, as it dawned on them that they had not gone down in a heap, his arms, which had locked around her of their own accord, refused to lift her up and set her back en pointe, and instead he held her, almost upside down, her arms open and relaxed, and they watched themselves in the mirror, winded and bloodied and full of disbelief. In fact, he never put her on her feet but instead lowered her to the floor of the dreary basement studio. Things had proceeded rapidly, unstoppably. He had peeled off her leotard and tights like one long snakeskin, exposing her imagined flesh, her familiar shape.

Astonish Me - Pg 195

 It had begun to rain, and she dropped off the windowsill and replaced the ferns. Harry helped her close the windows. Rain tapped politely, asking to be let in, and then started hammering and hammering against the glass.

Astonish Me - Pg 185

   He rubs her back the way his mother rubs his when he  is sick or sad, feeling the sharp edges of her shoulder blades through her tank top, the bumps of her spine, the flat wings of muscle. her grief makes her distant despite the nearness of her body; her vertebrae slide under his fingers like worry beads. He wants to wipe away some of her sadness. "Chloe?" he whispers. "You know I love you."

Astonish Me - Pg 184

 He is sure he knows her body better than anyone else, much better than the boys who get to touch it everywhere, probably better than she know it. When she walks toward him in the halls at school, he prepares, without thinking, to lift her. He knows the exact weight of her body, the limits of its strength, the smell of its sweat. His fingers have left bruises on her inner thighs, her hips, her arms.

Astonish Me - Pg 172

   "You can freak out, if you want," she tried once.
   "I don't," Elaine said, not quite snapping, but firmly. "Don't worry. I'm not going to suddenly explode and rend my garments and then be catatonic in your guest room for a week. I'm comfortable this way. There's always a little motor going somewhere, processing, but it's private."

Astonish Me - Pg 157

 The other girls were excited by the  prospect of dancing to music with singing, so Joan had indulged her, watching Chloe mouth the lyrics in the mirror, refraining from reminding her that her battements didn't need to be quite so emotive.

Astonish Me - Pg 149

 All those years ago, when Jacob drove Joan out to the beach with plans to kiss her, the tension of loving her had been so electric, so torturous, that he had worried about cardiac arrest, about being killed by his own desire. Now that he is finally--finally, after more than twenty years--sure of her love, the longing has vanished. he still loves her, but no passion, especially not one germinated in a hothouse of adolescent despair, could survive so much familiarity and certainty. She has changed, too. She is not so wary anymore, not always in retreat, not unknowable. They are two animals inhabiting the same den, each accepting the presence of the other, going about the business of living.

Astonish Me - Pg 145

   Harry knows the basic outline of Joan's history with Rusakov, but he seems to sense there is more, something adult and tangled and uncomfortable, a mesh of fungal filaments that his parents have done their best to conceal. He is always poking around, asking questions, trying to turn up the loose end that will make everything clear. He does not understand that he cannot understand, that the loves of others are unfathomable.

Astonish Me - Pg 143

 His stride lengthens until he is half galloping toward the glass doors, his arms lifting away from his sides as though he might leap into the air. But he stops short, pivoting to face his father, radiating energy, and it is a miracle he only folds his arms across his chest and shifts from foot to foot. He always seems to be on the verge of some ostentatious movement, some theatrical gesture.

Astonish Me - Pg 133

 Harry goes and swims with little complaint, but he is fundamentally an indoor child, dreamy and thoughtful and given to abrupt, consuming interests (astronauts, trains, submarines) that require semiweekly trips to the library for books he races through, shoveling information into himself like coal into a furnace.

Astonish Me - Pg 113

 He goes away. He comes back. More and more slowly, but he comes back. When they are alone, lying quietly, he holds her the way a child holds a stuffed animal: for comfort, for security, out of a primate's urge to cling, to close one's arms around a warm, soft object. Eventually, she knows, he will decide not to come back, but something--a force she wishes she could identify--binds him to her.

Astonish Me - Pg 111

   "This city is exquisite," Joan says. "It's trite to say so, but I never get used to it. It makes me greedy. I want to stuff it into my pockets."
   "What is this word?" he asks, his cheek against her temple.
   "Which word?"
   "With 'x'."
   "Exquisite. It means beautiful. But more than that. Like... so delicate and perfect it's almost painful."
   "Painful... it is not help."
   "Perfect down to the smallest part. Like the most lovely ballerina possible. Delicate, fragile, almost too beautiful to look at. She is exquisite."
   "Exquisite," he repeats, and a slight shift in his body betrays that his mind has left her, is following that ghostly ballerina off the bridge and away into the Parisian night. She should have thought of a different example. To remind him of her presence, she leans against his side. Grasping her shoulders, he turns her to him, bends to nuzzle her neck.
   Her happiness is also exquisite, excruciating, barbed with fear. At any moment, it will be taken from her.

Astonish Me - Pg 110

 The principal who danced Giselle runs offstage, returns with an armful of red and white roses bound with a huge blue ribbon. She curtsys low, offering them to Arslan. He accepts, plucking out one red rose to give back to her. Joan watches him bow and bow to the roaring maw of the theater, and she remembers the waterfall. Here is the answer to his question.

Astonish Me - Pg 109

   "Qu'est-ce que c'est?" he shouted over the roar of water.
   "C'est une..." Joan didn't know the French word for waterfall, and surely he could see for himself it was a waterfall, surely they had waterfalls in Russia. He was asking something else, something for which she had no answer in any language.

Astonish Me - Pg 108

 Out there, he will see her in the corps, no longer his rescuer but one of many identical girls, a bit of background, a swan or a peasant or a wili or a shade, and she will see him not as the man who smokes in her bed and wallows in her bathtub and splays naked in her armchair, flipping through the Russian-English dictionary, but as she had first seen him: onstage, removed, at the spinning center of everything.

Astonish Me - Pg 100

 That he has chosen her fills her with an ever-shifting combination of amazement, confusion, joy, a desperate feeling she suspects is love, and a fear of failure that pursues her through the days and nights.

Astonish Me - Pg 96

  Quietly, he says, "My mother spoke French to me."
  She doesn't know what to ask. She is nothing. Joan's letters are nothing. His life seems immeasurably large.

Astonish Me - Pg 95

 She heard he sleeps with men, too, but only outside the company. Dancers, even the gay ones, talk about that as if it is sleazy, shameful--it's the secrecy, they say, the self-hatred of it, and why even bother with the girls?--but Elaine can't imagine Mr. K doing anything that isn't aesthetically perfect. She can't imagine him hating himself, because he is a genius. If he sleeps with men, it must be beautiful.

Astonish Me - Pg 85

 But the beauty of Arslan's dancing is not what moves Joan to cry in her red velvet aerie: it is a dream of perfection blowing through the theater. She has been dancing since before her fifth birthday, and she realizes that the beauty radiating from him is what she has been chasing all along, what she has been trying to wring out of her own inadequate body.

Astonish Me - Pg 78

 "Do you want to marry him?"
 "I don't want to marry anyone else. Maybe that's half the battle."

Astonish Me - Pg 72

 When he made his first dance on her, he rearranged the cells of her body according to his own specifications, rewired her nerves, possessed her. Her civilian boyfriends could not understand her that way. They treated her like a fragile possession of exotic provenance, when she is really a tool, an invention, a weapon.

Astonish Me - Pg 70

 Never in her life, not once, has she danced the way she wishes to, but futility has become an accepted companion. The idea that lives beyond the mirror makes teasing, flickering appearances but never quite shows itself, never solidifies into something that can be looked at and not just glimpsed. She might surprise it as she whips her head around, spotting during pirouettes, or catch it flitting though one hand or foot. But it never stays.

Astonish Me - Pg 63

   Not that Sandy would cheat on Gary, but to flirt, to play pretend in this world of smooth, perfect, colorful moving surfaces, is to breathe deeply, to relax back into the shape of the person she once was.

Astonish Me - Pg 57

   In the dark, lying against his body as though it were a gently respiring bolster, she imagines she can feel his thoughts coming through his skin like a fever. She feels his disappointment, his accusatory argument that she had been willing to trick him into conceiving a baby when he was young and unprepared but now that he has spent five years proving himself as a husband and father, she is unmoved by his desire for another. She feels him criticizing her vanity, rejecting her concern for her body as unjustified, even pathetic, now that she doesn't perform. She feels his sadness that the family he imagined isn't to be. She feels his love grow less dense around her, like fog lifting.
   But, really, all she can feel is his breathing.

Astonish Me - Pg 56

   Jacob's hands come up to clasp her thighs. His chin lifts; his eyelids droop. Desire looks like something going away at first, an ebbing.

Astonish Me - Pg 55

   She considers climbing on top of him, kissing him, but he will recognize the cheapness. She could tell him there is no one she would rather be married to, that her love is growing, but slowly, accumulating imperceptibly the way trace minerals in dripping water build rock structures in caves, and it would all be true. But what he wants is impossible--he wants to change the past, for everything to happen in the right order. He wants them to love each other equally, but he is afraid of what it would be like if they did.