Tiffany Baker

“We see what we want to see in life, regardless of whether it's really in front of us or not...”

“She was as necessary as the sun to me”

“A gardin is where you can find a whole spectrum of life, birth and death”

“Death almost always rearranges life, sometimes for the worse, many times for the better,”

“I figure that if a secret has an answer, it'll out on its own if it's meant to, and if it doesn't then maybe providence has a better reason for keeping it hidden than you think.”

“Sometimes it's possible to see misfortune coming and prepare for it, I guess, but most of the time, when a person disappears, it's as unexpected and shocking as hail in the middle of June.”

“But you can't worry about what life's going to spit in your direction.”

“Do you want to know the difference between a good story and the truth? . . . The little bits, Robert Morgan.That's all. If you get those right, you can get away with murder.”

“When you get back, I finally wrote, let's lay ourselves down in the fields outside, and sleep there for the night, whatever the weather. We'll let the crows roost on our shoulders and skulls, let them nudge our necks with their wings, and pick at our earlobes, nibbling all the rotten bits out of us until we're nothing more than sinew, bone, and teeth. Until we're so pure, you can see right through us down to the roots and dirt. Until even our memories are eaten alive.”

“There was no etiquette guide in the universe that told you how to handle waking up in a house you'd fled from as a teenager with your estranged sister in one room accross the hall and your husband's pregnant teenage mistress in the other.”

“I was sixteen and just waking up to the peculiar rules of love - how what's left unsaid between two people can be a far more complicated language than what's written on the page.”

“...but life doesn't give us the option to remake our decisions, only the power to reconceive them”

“At night, the valleys of my body curve around him, creating a geography I never knew existed before, where size is relative and more is always better, and I can't seem to get enough of it.”

“Isn't that part of love, I wanted to ask, carrying someone else's ghosts for them?”

“Maybe the heavens were a kind of celestial grave, I thought, the way the earth is a repository for our flesh, and when we stared at the stars, we were really beholding a million lives twinkling back at us, asking us not to forget.”

“Well, the way I see it, honey, love's love, whatever shape it comes in.”

“On the face of things, we were hopelessly mismatched, but somehow we fit together perfectly.”

“Tabitha's quilt was more than pieces of fabric sewn together. It was a patchwork of souls.”

“Of course, this memory makes me sorrowful now, for it anyone ever knew the shape of me, it was Amelia - and not just the outer lines of me, either, but all my innards as well. She was as necessary as the sun to me. She was the quiet heat that shimmered inside my shadow and made it live, and without her, I am a little darker.”

“The body is just the body. It has it's own structures, it's own laws. It's a thing unto itself. When it breaks down, that's it.”

“Everything in the world has its two faces, however. Weeds sometimes blossom into artful flowers. Beauty walks hand in hand with ugliness, sickness with health, and life tiptoes around in the horned shadow of death. The trick is to recognize which is which and to recognize what you're dealing with at the time.”

“What I really wanted to do was linger in the tidy lines that Marcus had scored into the earth. I wanted to sit in the exact center of the spiral and wait for the plants to unfurl themselves. I wanted them to climb and rove over my limbs until I burst into bloom with them.”

“Sometimes I think I collect souls to make up for the ones I've lost over the course of my life.”

“So often, we believe we are alone in the privacy of our fantasies, but that is a delusion as well - and perhaps the most dangerous kind. For in letting ourselves forget about the common threads of our innermost wishes, we erode our foundations and lose the keystone of our souls.”

“Who says all the lines of love are supposed to match up? I'd never thought about it that way before - that maybe your perfect other wasn't everything you already were, but everything you were never going to be.”

“Death is a kind of guilt in itself. We're all alive in this world together, and we're also all mortal, but when one person pulls his thread through to the other side, it can start a chain reaction you never in your wildest dreams saw coming. Maybe you'll be left with nothing more than an unholy knot to unpick. Maybe a new design. Sometimes a whole new perspective on yourself.”

“Make sure you don't lose your heart living with Robert Morgan. Make sure he doesn't use up all the very best parts of you.”

“Whatever you ever saw in that mirror left it long ago and became part of you. No one can steal that.”

“Not like me, who would have given anything to shed my cumbersome skin and bones, stripping myself down to marrow, to nothing more than a gambler's heart, which beat fast and true and still believed that somewhere out there, a deck was stacked entirely in my favor.”

“A life passed amid gangsters, thieves, smugglers, and gamblers had granted Amelia an unerring nose for greed, vanity, and other assorted venal characteristics, and in Miss Sparrow, she smelled rancid pride combined with the bitter char of unrequited love. She smelled the lemon tang of loneliness mingling with despair. Just under Priscilla Sparrow's skin, Amelia could tell, a rosemary blast of judiciousness rippled, followed by the must decay of jealousy and a lingering note of envy - in short (and in spite of all of Miss Sparrow's better attempts with Dick Crane), the odors of a lifelong spinster.”

“Amelia and I were at the age where wonderful things sometimes still did happen, but far less often than they used to.”

“I looked at my sister's white knees nestled together like a pair of Brenda's eggs and had the urge, not for the first time, to crack her right open. I wanted to pick her ribs apart until I got to the messy center of her - surely somewhere inside my sister there must be some sort of mess, I thought - and dip my fingers in”

“And one day, you, too, might grow up to be enchanting.”

“If there was one thing Brenda Dyerson was good at, she knew it, was cooking up the scraps destiny had laid out on its plates for her.”

“Even back then, I guess, I suspected that sometimes the only available choice in life is to spit on death and run.”

“...Maybe it was just the perfect realization to all ones' dreams....where a magic elixir could heal you and make you strong, where men could make roses bloom with the single touch of a thumb, and where the bigger women were, so much the better.”

“She never understood that love -- especially that of a child -- was the most necessary weight you can endure in life, even if it hurts, even if it tugs bags under the skin of your eyes. Without it, the soul skitters to the edge of the world and teeters there, confused.”