“Shopping is hope.”

“A couple of years ago my sister Judy and I were each given a box of truffles. The tiny print said two pieces contained 310 calories and there were six pieces in each box. We were sitting on the bus headed downtown, quietly doing our calculations: Judy was dividing by two and I was multiplying by three. When she realized what I was doing, a look came over her face that is hard to describe. 'I lost all hope for you' she says now.”

“She would (if she could) put her arm around the girl she'd been and try to tell her Take it easy, but the girl would not have listened. The girl had no receptors for Take it easy. And besides, "Hey Jude" was on the radio, it was her prayer, her manifesto, almost her dwelling place. She sang it everywhere. The music made her cry then; it makes her cry now. Listening to it now brings back memories so sharp they taste like blood in her mouth.”

“There is nothing like calamity for refreshing the moment. Ironically, the last several years my life had begun to feel shapeless, like underwear with the elastic gone, the days down around my ankles.”

“You had a certain way of saying my name. It was the inflection maybe, something you put into those three syllables. And now you are gone and my name is just my name again, not the story of my life.”

“The past is in the wastebasket.”

“Is memory property? If two people remember something differently is one of them wrong?”