“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.”

“I know all of her moods and the way they play across her features, but I am still awed at the configuration of lips and eyes and cheeks that make up that face that I love. Out of all of the others I could have loved. My Sissy.”

“Hattie had never been easy to love. She was too quiet, it was impossible to know what she was thinking. And she was angry all of the time and so disdainful when her high expectations weren't met.”

“Hattie’s children died in the order in which they were born: first Philadelphia, then Jubilee.”

“...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.”

“I have looked at my father many times and wondered how he could stand knowing he was my mother’s ruin. He was too weak to leave her. Mother should have thrown him out and saved them both, like Sissy was saving the two of us.”

“She wished the man outside really were Thomas, so she and Billups could again have the same enemy and the same fear.O”