“Days she's wasted locked up here in this room, and nothing she's done is half as good as the sketch of a chair she did while shitting her pants.”

“There must be another life, she thought, sinking back into her chair, exasperated. Not in dreams; but here and now, in this room, with living people. She felt as if she were standing on the edge of a precipice with her hair blown back; she was about to grasp something that just evaded her. There must be another life, here and now, she repeated. This is too short, too broken. We know nothing, even about ourselves.”

“When she had been married a little while, she concluded that love was half a longing of a kind that possession did nothing to mitigate.”

“Cecilia knew she could not go on wasting her days in the stews of her untidied room, lying on her bed in a haze of smoke, chin propped on her hand, pins and needles spreading up through her arm as she read her way through Richardson's Clarissa.”

“And here she was. Lying on the floor of a dusty, empty, locked room thinking how grateful she felt.She smiled, though it hurt tremendously to do so, thinking how blessed she had been to have spent twelve years with the most precious gifts from God. She felt honored that they called her mother. She knew she had done the best she could teaching them about life and love, faith and family. Margo lay slowly dying from the wounds inflicted by a monster, but she was at peace. Because though the devil meant it for evil, God turned it to good.”

“She sketched this moment into her mind, because nothing could be so perfect. Nothing could stay right, and last.”