"The women glare at each other. Grin. You have friends when you're fifteen years old. Sometimes you get them back."
"Humanity has many shortcomings, but none is stronger than pride."
"Just because you don’t like peanut butter doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t like . . . peanuts."
"You can love something without loving everything about it. You don't have to feel embarrassed about not being proud. That applies to hockey, but it also applies to friends."
"What is a community? It is the sum total of our choices."
"The worst thing about having power over other people's lives is that you sometimes get things wrong."
"The very worst events in life have that effect on a family: we always remember, more sharply than anything else, the last happy moments before everything fell apart."
"Never trust people who don't have something in their lives that they love beyond all reason."
"The children's hobbies aren't only the children's hobbies - the parents put just as many hours into them, year after year, sacrificing so much, paying out such huge amounts of money, that their significance eats its way even into adult brains. They started to symbolize other things compensating for or reinforcing the parents' own failures."
"Winners have a tendency to be forgiven in this town."
"It doesn't take long to persuade each other to stop seeing a person as a person. And when enough people are quiet for long enough, a handful of voices can give the impression that everyone is screaming."
"For the perpetrator, rape lasts just a matter of minutes. For the victim, it never stops."
"Everyone has a thousand wishes before a tragedy, but just one afterward."
"I just mean ... damn ... this might sound a bit crazy, but sometimes you can't help wondering if we don't take all this a bit too seriously. If we aren't putting too much pressure on the juniors. They're not really much more than ... kids."..."That depends what we want from the kids. And what the kids want from hockey."
"She’s fifteen, above the age of consent, and he’s seventeen, but he’s still “the boy” in every conversation. She’s “the young woman”.Words are not small things."
"She is told all the things she shouldn’t have done: She shouldn’t have waited so long before going to the police. She shouldn’t have gotten rid of the clothes she was wearing. Shouldn’t have showered. Shouldn’t have drunk alcohol. Shouldn’t have put herself in that situation. Shouldn’t have gone into the room, up the stairs, given him the impression. If only she hadn’t existed, then none of this would have happened, why didn’t she think of that?"
"Ana was a tornado. A jagged, hundred-sided peg in a community where everyone was supposed to fit into round holes."