- Jonathan Miller: Don't you get scared, walking through those woods?
- Cairo Sweet: I'm the scariest thing in there.
- Cairo Sweet: Literature is my solace in the solitude. And writing is my only escape, because, you see, I've never left the edges of this town. It's positively gothic, really. Lonely girl longs to be meaningful. Lonely girl longs to be loved. Books make longing to seem romantic, but it's awful. It's greedy, and I wear longing like a fucking veil.
- Beatrice June Harker: Teenage girls are dangerous, Jonathan. They're full of emotional violence and vituperation.
- Beatrice June Harker: Vocabulary doesn't make you a writer any more than math makes you a rocket scientist.
- Cairo Sweet: You can't blur the lines, and then expect me to see a boundary when I suddenly cross it.
- Jonathan Miller: Why do you always have to hold my coffee hostage?
- Boris Fillmore: Because you're a fucking puritan and I feel it's my duty to punish the goodness out of you.
- Jonathan Miller: You're a sadist.
- Boris Fillmore: I'm a public school teacher.
- Jonathan Miller: Henry Miller is public enemy number one with the censors. I'm not even approved to teach him.
- Cairo Sweet: So?
- Jonathan Miller: So, it would be a controversial choice.
- Cairo Sweet: If it's not controversial, it's not interesting.
- Cairo Sweet: A kiss ... a muse. It is a question, an unlocked door. It is ... elation ... and anguish.
- [first lines]
- Cairo Sweet: [narrating] What is an adult? Becoming one didn't suddenly transform me into anything outstanding or significant. I am 18 and entirely unremarkable. Languishing in the wilds of nowhere, Tennessee, in this tomb of a house left to me by my brilliant and selfish parents. They're no dead, though they pretend I am. They're permanently aboard.
- Cairo Sweet: Is this what it is to be an adult - the same exquisite longing of adolescence, but with the burden of constant accountability.
- Winnie: It's like he's been living in gray scale and you're the first thing he's ever seen in color.
- Jonathan Miller: Don't you have a class to teach?
- Boris Fillmore: Well you know I can't start my day without seeing you.
- Jonathan Miller: No, you really can.
- Boris Fillmore: How'd you score this big classroom anyway?
- Jonathan Miller: They cut the theater program.
- Boris Fillmore: But they kept you?
- Jonathan Miller: Along with the other props, yeah.
- Jonathan Miller: I'm getting the impression there's nothing I can say ... ah, to defend my position here.
- Joyce Manor: Because there isn't.
- Beatrice June Harker: What would I possibly worry about other than dying of boredom having to listen to your inventions of conflict?