“There were worse things than being young and foolish.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“This is what keeps ghosts locked to the earth, that sweet burning need for something they loved and gave up too soon.”