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

“Only Gracie knew what it was like to wake up at night and feel how cold sheets can get on the empty side of a bed.”

“Sometimes you need to be touched to know you're still alive.”

“The world was an awful place, too awful to live in, if people could kill a President so easily.”

“caught up in the exciting world of adults and their antics”

“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.”

“The years of her life tumbled out onto the floor like marbles that she would never be able to gather up again in one bowl. The years of her life had been a made puzzle that one day gets unmade, the pieces all scattered.”