“Exactly,' she said, and made her point as simply as that. There wasn't a lot of bullshit in my heaven.~pg 8”

“There wasn't a lot of bullshit in my heaven.”

“After a few days in heaven, I realized that the javelin-throwers and the shot-putters and the boys who played basketball on the cracked blacktop were all in their own version of heaven. Theirs just fit with mine- didn't duplicate it precisely, but had a lot of the same things going on inside.~pg 17”

“Sometimes Holly seemed like she wasn't paying attention, and other times she was gone when I went looking for her. That was when she went to a part of heaven we didn't share. I missed her then, but it was and odd sort of missing because by then I knew the meaning of forever. I could not have what I wanted most: Mr. Harvey dead and me living. Heaven wasn't perfect. But I came to believe that if I watched closely, and desired, I might change the lives of those I loved on Earth.”

“Do you ever think of her?' she asked.They were quiet again. All the time,' Ruth said. A chill ran down my spine. 'Sometimes I think she's lucky, you know. I hate this place.'Me too,' Ray said. 'But I've lived other places. This is just a temporary hell, not a permanent one.'You're not implying...'She's in heaven, if you believe in that stuff.'You don't?'I don't think so, no.'I do,' Ruth said. 'I don't mean la-la angel wing crap, but I do think there's a heaven.'Is she happy?'It is heaven, right?'But what does that mean?'The tea was stone-cold and the first bell had already rung. Ruth smiled into her cup. 'Well, as my dad would say, it means she's out of this shithole.'~pgs 82-83”

“Inside the room it was dark now, the florescent light behind my father flickering so slightly it lit only the most obvious masses in the room. My sister was in a chair pulled up alongside the bed, her head resting on the side of it with her hand extended out to touch my father. My father, deep under, was lying on his back. My mother could not know that I was there with them, that here were the four of us, so changed now from the days when she tucked Lindsey and me into bed and went to make love to her husband, our father. Now she saw the pieces. She saw that my sister and father, together, had become a piece. She was glad of it.I had played a hide-and-seek game of love with my mother as I grew up, courting her attention and approval in a way that I had never had to with my father. I didn't have to play hide-and-seek anymore. As she stood in the darkened room and watched my sister and father, I knew one of the things that heaven meant. I had a choice, and it was not to divide my family in my heart.~pg 154; Susie's family and heaven”

“On my way home from the junior high, I would sometimes stop at the edge of our property and watch my mother ride the ride-on mower, looping in and out among the pine trees, and I could remember then how she used to whistle in the mornings as she made her tea and how my father, rushing home on Thursdays, would bring her marigolds and her face would light up in yellowy in delight. They had been deeply, separately, wholly in love- apart from her children my mother could reclaim this love, but with them she began to drift. It was my father who grew toward us as the years went by; it was my mother who grew away. ~pg 153; love”