“Fine doesn't call before dawn.”

“God doesn't come to sit on the porch and sip lemonade. He comes to take over.”

“You ought to go now before she wakes up,” Hattie said. She handed her daughter to Pearl. I’m in the floor, she thought.”

“...Hattie wanted to give her babies names that weren't already chiseled on a headstone in the family plots in Georgia, so she gave them names of promise and of hope, reaching-forward names, not looking-back ones.”

“Maybe we have only a finite amount of love to give. We're born with our portion, and if we love and are not loved enough in return, it's depleted.”

“The thing to do was to insult her or slap her or run her out into the night. She’d left him with all their children. She was holding another man’s baby in her arms. Anyone would agree that he ought to do something terrible to her, but she had been gone fifteen hours, and in that fifteen hours his life had crumbled like a lump of dry earth.”

“She didn’t know what to make of this sporadic urgency with him. It had confounded and humiliated her for the thirty years of their marriage. These endless pregnancies. And worse, her body’s insistence on a man who was the greatest mistake of her life.”