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

“No matter how much he talked, she never answered him, but he knew she was still there. He knew it was like the soldiers he had read about. They would have an arm or a leg blown off, and for days, even weeks after it happened, they could still feel the arm itching, the leg itching, the mother calling.”

“Yvette had never talked about her marriage - she was a smart girl, and she knew you had no right to complain about someone you got all the way to the altar with. You made that choice, even if you were a child when you did it, and the marriage vow was sacred.”

“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.”

“Studying the young woman’s long thin legs, Tessa wondered how different her life would have been if she had had legs like that. She could not help but suspect that it would have been almost entirely different.”

“If she had only known, things might have been different between us, but I could never talk to her about it"[Jimmy about Molly]”