"I was eight and wasn't yet afraid of death because I still believed in forces bigger than myself and my own will."- Chapter 2, 'The House That Shouts and Shakes'

"I sighed again, trying to use the exhale to rid myself of the rising anger I was worried was going to make me do something violent. If only I could rid myself as quickly of this turbulent bitch."- Chapter 1, 'Customer Service, Home Visits'

"There's an infantilisation that comes with being queer. Everyone else is adjusted to love, everyone else has memorised a rule book you have never seen and cannot read. Then by the time they're seventeen, or fifteen, or whatever, they've already thrown themselves into loving another person meanwhile you spent so long working on loving yourself, you wake up surrounded by hand-holding couples feeling like an awkward tween with no idea how you can grow up." - Chapter 11, 'The Writer of the Family'

"If I arranged my words prettily enough around the pain, surely things will get better. I mean it's never worked, but I never stopped trying. If you think about it, I'm trying right now." - Chapter 11, 'The Writer of the Family'

"She didn't mean to have me, I'm sure. I was just like a dress you didn't like and lost the receipt for. My mother was not a bad person, but she was a terrible mother."- Chapter 1, 'Customer Service, Home Visits'

"If you think I'm harsh that's okay. You didn't live in that house and you did not live with my mother. I love her like I love God, really; from distance, with distrust on both sides and a lack of communication." - Chapter 30, 'The House on the Hill'

"They were opinionated. They were loud. They were a hell creature someone put in a persons body. They were one of the best people I knew. They were an idiot."- Chapter 2, 'The House That Shouts and Shakes'

"She is the only view in this clean world we have discovered, and I feel a sunlit emptiness when I look at her without the clutter of anxiety. My memory is crystal clear and entirely divided from how I recall the rest of this story. It's like a story I told to myself in a different way, a revised script with the notes scrubbed from the margins."- Chapter 4, 'Carsick'