Cathie Pelletier

“The world was an awful place, too awful to live in, if people could kill a President so easily.”

“She had stood there with the phone pressed to her ear as though it were a huge plastic seashell, all the unhappy years of her marriage echoing again in her eardrums, washing up in the coils of her memory.”

“Mattie felt drained, as though someone had stood her on her head and poured her entire heart and soul right out of her body.”

“The big television crouched in the shadowy beam of the porch light. Mattie could see its black, open face, and she felt as though she were looking into the mouth of a deep, dangerous cave.”

“Who the hell ain't dysfunctional these days? When the Kennedys straighten out, then maybe the rest of us should worry.”

“the sort of kid who steered his bicycle around snakes crossing the road”

“talking above the pain of his broken heart”

“There were worse things than being young and foolish.”

“You don't jump off a bridge by mistake.”

“looking off at the past as though it were a place one might still get to”

“Peace of mind comes in the strangest boxes.”

“I know how loud the seconds can sound as you stand by a window and peer out into the night.”

“Only Gracie knew what it was like to wake up at night and feel how cold sheets can get on the empty side of a bed.”

“He had lived as a handful of taffy between his mother and his father all his life, had been pulled in so many directions, stretched here and there, that all he could do was plaster a mighty smile on his face.”

“Nobody likes for the hero to walk away.”

“Americans look for heroes in the strangest of places.”

“Sometimes you need to be touched to know you're still alive.”

“When you don't know enough about life to know what you might have missed out on, your imagination plays wicked tricks on you.”

“She knew for certain there were all kinds of people who craved their youth, who would run like gazelles toward that fishhook of time, peeling off the years like old imagined skins.”

“The years of her life tumbled out onto the floor like marbles that she would never be able to gather up again in one bowl. The years of her life had been a made puzzle that one day gets unmade, the pieces all scattered.”

“It wasn't that Mattie didn't believe in God. She did, she most surely did. She just didn't like some of the things He did, is all.”

“Sometimes, in the dark of night, when no one else could hear him but me, he'd cry out, like he was fighting some silent little war in his head.”

“caught up in the exciting world of adults and their antics”

“This is what keeps ghosts locked to the earth, that sweet burning need for something they loved and gave up too soon.”

“Everything seemed to be a clue to the hereafter, now that one of her own had gone there.”