“I began to understand what bound Pearl to their simple mystery because i felt the same connection. in front of us, all around us, was the energy of life and growth. beauty was only a month away and it depended, in part, in what i could do.”

“But sometimes I wanted to feel like a child, to know that he would stand in front of me while waves crashed towards us or arrows come at us.”

“I could feel their grief as if it were a beast holding us down.”

“Life is about taking what's given to us and creating something wonderful.”

“If there was some way of knowing which boys were likely to turn out to be decent men, boys that could love us back as passionately as we felt we could love them, then we could banish the likelihood of divorce and unhappiness to a statistically unlikely outcome.”

“Standing there, that day, I felt like Sally was being torn from my skin and there was no way I could ever fly free, without her right beside me.”

“I was thinking how complicated life is and how there are no simple roads or paths. We are a fabric of mistakes and hurts; a family tree of fumbled attempts, successes and failures.”