“The big television crouched in the shadowy beam of the porch light. Mattie could see its black, open face, and she felt as though she were looking into the mouth of a deep, dangerous cave.”

“Mattie felt drained, as though someone had stood her on her head and poured her entire heart and soul right out of her body.”

“It wasn't that Mattie didn't believe in God. She did, she most surely did. She just didn't like some of the things He did, is all.”

“looking off at the past as though it were a place one might still get to”

“She had stood there with the phone pressed to her ear as though it were a huge plastic seashell, all the unhappy years of her marriage echoing again in her eardrums, washing up in the coils of her memory.”

“She knew for certain there were all kinds of people who craved their youth, who would run like gazelles toward that fishhook of time, peeling off the years like old imagined skins.”

“He had lived as a handful of taffy between his mother and his father all his life, had been pulled in so many directions, stretched here and there, that all he could do was plaster a mighty smile on his face.”