“I don’t ex­pect you to un­der­stand,” Adam says. “You’re still the eight-​year-​old sit­ting in school, sit­ting in church, be­liev­ing ev­ery­thing you’re told. You re­mem­ber pic­tures in books. They planned how you’d live your whole life. You’re still asleep.”

“Ten years ago, he was the hard­work­ing salt of the earth. All he want­ed was to go to Heav­en. Sit­ting here to­day, ev­ery­thing that he worked for in the world is lost. All his ex­ter­nal rules and con­trols are gone.”

“Ev­ery­thing you re­mem­ber is wrong.”

“You don’t have to con­trol ev­ery­thing,” she says. “You can’t con­trol ev­ery­thing.”

“You’re training a new employee,' says Mrs. Clark, 'to take over your boring old job.' When you raise a child.”

“With every lecture, you’re forced to look again at every choice you’ve made over the lesson-by-lesson chain of your entire life. And after all these years, you see how little you have to work with, how limited your life and education have been. How scant was your courage and curiosity. Not to mention your expectations.”

“When you’re twenty-four,” Marla says, “you have no idea how far you can really fall, but I was a fast learner.”