Anne Norman

“I loved him impersonally, abstractly, like a character in a book who, by virtue of their very distance from you, their belonging to a different world that you may never yourself enter, enflames your longing all the more.”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Knockout Queen

“It was my otherness that so angered these boys, my unknowableness, my dangerous wrongness. They couldn't understand me and it made them want to extinguish me, and Terrance couldn't understand me and it made him want to save me.”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Knockout Queen

“That was the thing that was turning out to be most difficult about being a person. The people I had the most sympathy for were almost never the ones everyone else felt sympathy for.”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Knockout Queen

“What else were you supposed to do with pain but polish it until it became something pointy and pretty?”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Knockout Queen