“Perhaps one day she would find a place where she would stay. That would be good. To know that the place you were in was your own place—where you should be.”

“When you don't know where you're headed, you find places no one else would ever think to explore.”

“Find yourself a place in the universe,' she said, 'a place where the dirt feels like goodness under your feet. Take the right picture and a man will walk into it. If you can bear him even a little, then for a while let him stay.”

“A woman could do that to you - reach that place in your soul where the best and worst of you was kept. And once she was there, she owned that place and never left.”

“Stay because you want to be here. Stay because we would miss you. And stay because you can belong in more than one place, and one of your places is with us.”

“As a girl she had imagined the Milky Way was the curtain of heaven, a notion she had been sorry to abandon as she had grown up. But she would not abandon a belief in heaven itself, wherever that may be, because she felt that if she gave that up then there would be very little left. Heaven may not turn out to be the place of her imagining, she conceded--the place envisaged in the old Botswana stories, a place inhabited by gentle white cattle, with sweet breath--but it would surely be something not too unlike that, at least in the way it felt; a place where late people would be give all that they had lacked on this earth--a place of love for those who had not been loved, a place where those who had had nothing would find they had everything the human heart could desire.”