“There are some things, after all, that Sally Owens knows for certain: Always throw spilled salt over your left shoulder. Keep rosemary by your garden gate. Add pepper to your mashed potatoes. Plant roses and lavender, for luck. Fall in love whenever you can.”

“Some days are just born bad. You know the type. The kind you want to sweep into your palm like spilled salt and toss over your left shoulder, hoping that if you don't look back nothing worse will happen.”

“I was out of salt so I threw pepper over my left shoulder for luck and the poor guy behind me almost sneezed himself to death.”

“So? What are you going to do about it? Throw your mashed potatoes at me? I'm consumed by terror.”

“And if you worry that not finishing the food on your plate is a slap in the face of all the hungry people everywhere, you are not living in reality. The truth is that you either throw the food out or you throw it in, but either way it turns to waste. World hunger will not be solved by finishing the garlic mashed potatoes on your plate.”

“We dared the impossible, did the undoable, bore the unbearable, not merely once but over and over again. I don't believe in fate or inevitable destinies, as I keep telling folks. But I do believe in a certain kind of inevitability. When you plant a potato, you get a potato. When you plant a rose, you get a rose. There is a pattern already in the seed, and it will unfold according to its nature.”