“She could talk. If she was a sphinx she could have talked, if she was a stone she could have talked. I wondered when she'd get tired and leave. Even after I stopped listening it was like being battered with tiny pingpong balls.”

“She could not complain about not having shoes when the person she was talking to had no legs.”

“She could keep her silence, it was evident, as energetically as she could talk.”

“She did not want to talk of her sorrow, but with that sorrow in her heart she could not talk of outside matters.”

“He began to trace a pattern on the table with the nail of his thumb. "She kept saying she wanted to keep things exactly the way they were, and that she wished she could stop everything from changing. She got really nervous, like, talking about the future. She once told me that she could see herself now, and she could also see the kind of life she wanted to have - kids, husband, suburbs, you know - but she couldn't figure out how to get from point A to point B.”

“ I never could talk to my sister Molly, because she was loopy”