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

“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.”

“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 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.”

“When I was young I wanted so much to be like her. What a blessing are those moments when there is nothing to worry about, no thought of trouble or grief in the world.”

“Maybe attraction was aligned in heaven before our birth because there was no other way to explain my feelings. There were millions of boys on the earth. Why did it feel so strong?”

“It felt as though I had been holding on to Sally all these years, by the tips of my fingers. Just holding on. She was like a moth, fragile and fleeting. One rough breath, one lurch , one tiny movement of your hand and she'd fly away from you.”