How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
Sarah is the most enthusiastic cynical person on the planet. She'd be the perfect cheerleader if she wasn't so disgusted by school spirit. She's a literature fanatic like me, but reads darker, read Sartre in tenth grade—Nausea—which is when she started wearing black (even at the beach), smoking cigarettes (even thought she looks like the healthiest girl you've ever seen), and obsessing about her existential crisis (even as she partied into all hours of the night). (2.25)
Sartre's book, Nausea, focuses on the idea that "existence precedes essence." In other words, everyone starts out a blank slate and creates who they are by their actions alone. This might explain Sarah's contradictive personality—why shouldn't she both wear black and go to the beach all the time? She's in charge of who she is.
Quote #2
"I don't know if in your mature age you can understand this, Len, but this is the way it is: When men have it, no one seems to notice, they become astronauts or pilots or cartographers or criminals or poets. They don't stay around long enough to know if they've fathered children or not. When women get it, well, it's more complicated, it's just different." (10.6)
Gram has decided not to view her daughter's disappearance as the sign of something wrong with her. Instead, she's pointed out that if her daughter were a man, it would be more socially acceptable for her to disappear. This tells us a bit about the way she's tried to make sense of Paige's abandonment—she avoids labels like "crazy" or "damaged" in favor of a more complicated story.
Quote #3
She's lying on a rock in the sun reading Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex—in preparation, I'm sure, for her very promising guy-poaching expedition to State Women's Studies Department feminism symposium. (20.3)
The Second Sex is known as one of the early texts on feminist theory. That's a lot of homework to do in order to supposedly meet guys.