104 Quotes by Jennifer McMahon

Oh my God!” Sam said again, his voice shaking. I’ve given birth to something inhuman, Phoebe thought. A lamprey with row after row of teeth.

And deep down, she felt like maybe she didn't deserve it-that she belonged with the petty thieves and guys who drank Pabst Blue Ribbon for breakfast

Beautiful building,” Phoebe said. Sam nodded. “Classical Revival,” he said. It was yet another display of his seemingly unending knowledge that both made her proud and made her feel very small. Maybe if she had gone to college she would have learned about building styles and understand what Classical Revival meant. They could have intelligent discussions about things like rooflines and columns.

Marriage is full of such cut-and-dry arrangements, Rhonda thought,then felt that small ache she sometimes got at the back of her skull-the one that told her she might be alone forever, not a fate that she chose but rather a fate that seemed to have been chosen for her.

The world was full of dangers now that she was pregnant: mercury in tuna, hot tubs, beer, secondhand smoke, over-the-counter medicine. Not to mention crazy baby-abducting fairy kings.

Phoebe realized how very wrong she’d been about this house, this family. It was far darker, more dangerous than the places she’d grown up in. In the dingy little apartments her mother rented, everything was out in the open. Their lives were dirty and squalid, but they didn’t pretend to be anything else. Here, things seemed so normal, so perfect, but it was all a deception.

Think of me,' she said because it seemed like something a girl in a fairy tale might say. Think of me. Remember me. Love me. Turn me into a story you tell again and again. The sister who was good as gold and became a queen.

She closed her eyes. Said the four most comforting words she knew: "Once upon a time." An incantation.

We don't know the terrible things that are coming our way....We just see the shiny surface, our own beautiful selves reflected in it. Not the monster lurking beneath.[Shirley Harding Dufresne]