Killing Mr. Griffin

“Things did sometimes change. Someday—Someday, what? Her boniness would blossom into curves? She would get contact lenses? She who had been told by not one, not two, but three different doctors that her corneas weren’t shaped right to allow her to wear them? Someday she would turn into a heart-stopping beauty overnight? Is that what would happen?”

This quote underlies Susan’s hope that things can change for her, but they also focus on her glasses, a source of shame even though there’s nothing inherently embarrassing about having glasses. Susan’s self-consciousness is the internal conflict that drives her to participate in uncharacteristic actions.

“Still, Mark had that look about him, the one he got when he had some incredible plan in mind. It wasn’t really that his expression changed; Mark had one of those faces that seldom carried any expression at all. It was a lineless face, built on a triangle with the skin stretched taut and smooth from the wide cheekbones to the sharply pointed chin. The thing that changed was the eyes. They became very bright and shiny, as though they were made of glass, and the lids slipped down over them as though to conceal the look beneath—an illusion of sleepiness.”

Mark’s intimidating characterization is developed through the juxtaposition between his typically blank face and the depth of his eyes. The simile of Mark’s eyes as imitative of glass implies that Mark has a natural veneer about him. Duncan uses the term “illusion” as a way of foreshadowing that Mark’s personality hides his true intentions and darkness.

“The author had given some surprisingly high number of such cases and had said that runaway wives in America were soon going to equal or exceed the number of runaway husbands.”

This quote addresses a fundamental fear for teenagers: The dissolution of any stability in their home lives. This quote also highlights the American culture around single families, and further implies the desire to run away.