21
" The older Hero got, the less she got along with romantics: people who liked courtship and courtly love, people who had big ideas about how men and women should behave in their relationships with each other-- since typically these people thought only of men and women when they thought of romance. She found, oddly, that those people were often the least suited to sexual or romantic relationships, were staggeringly selfish and borderline abusive both in bed and in life, and treated their partners and friends more like protagonists and side characters, props in the love story they were constructing, in which they played the starring role, full of grand gestures and pronouncements. "
― Elaine Castillo , America Is Not the Heart
22
" Not for the first time, your own mind terrified you: the careless black-hole greediness of it, that you could leave things there thinking they were safe, and then turn around and find that they'd been eaten away, gnawed on without mercy or honor so that not even the bones were left, destroyed nonchalantly by something mightier in you, something mightier than you, some big-time fucking asshole, whose name was, what, even? Forgetting. You could forget an entire world, the person you'd been there. It scared the shit out of you. "
― Elaine Castillo , America Is Not the Heart
27
" The older Hero got, the less she got along with romantics: people who liked courtship and courtly love, people who had big ideas about how men and women should behave in their relationships with each other—since typically these people thought only of men and women when they thought of romance. She found, oddly, that those people were often the least suited to sexual or romantic relationships, were staggeringly selfish and borderline abusive both in bed and in life, and treated their partners and friends more like protagonists and side characters, props in the love story they were constructing, in which they played the starring role, full of grand gestures and pronouncements "
― Elaine Castillo , America Is Not the Heart
33
" Though later, as always, you'd realize that what you knew about the worst of the world, the knowledge about life you'd stored up, tart and proud because of where you'd been born, what you'd run from, what'd made you, all amounted to - mostly nothing, like anyone else's stupid history. It didn't make you any wiser or stronger, the way you hoped, the way you usually played it. It just made you you. "
― Elaine Castillo , America Is Not the Heart