“She wasn't actually speaking to me, she was singing a kind of lullaby of talk. But, eventually, the music stopped. ”

“She wasn't much of a talker when there was nothing to say.”

“But she was waiting patiently. She no longer believed in talk. It never rescued anything. At seventy she had come to believe in time alone.”

“About Grandma Lynn: She was waiting patiently. She no longer believed in talk. At seventy, she had come to believe in time alone.”

“She no longer believed in talk. It never rescued anything. ”

“I realized then that they would not know when I was gone, just as they could not know how heavily I hovered in a particular room. Buckley had talked to me and I had talked back. Even if I hadn't thought I'd been talking to him. I had. I became manifest in whatever way they wanted me to be.And there she was, alone and walking out in the cornfield while everyone else I cared for sat together in one room. She would always feel me and think of me. I could see that, but there was no longer anything I could do. Ruth had been a girl haunted and now she would be a woman haunted. First by accident and now by choice. All of it, the story of my life and death, was hers if she chose to tell it, even to one person at a time.”

“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.”