“People think they know the mystery of living in your skin. They don't. There's no one who knows except the person who carts it around her own self.”

“The person we know at first, she thinks, is not the one we know at last.”

“She likes the people with the endurance to tolerate the drudge, the ones who know that pain is a requirement, not a curse.”

“That was the sort of everyday love I had to learn to contend with: if you grow up with it, it's hard to think you'll ever match it. I used to think it was difficult for children of folks who really loved each other, hard to get out from under that skin because sometimes it's just so comfortable you don't want to have to develop your own.”

“All the lives we could live, all the people we would never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is what the world is.”

“If you think you know all the secrets, you think you know all the cures.”

“I recalled the myth that I had once heard as a university student – thirty-six hidden saints in the world, all of them doing the work of humble men, carpenters, cobblers, shepherds. They bore the sorrows of the earth and they had a line of communication with God, all except one, the hidden saint, who was forgotten. The forgotten one was left to struggle on his own, with no line of communication to that which he so hugely needed. Corrigan had lost his line with God: he bore the sorrows on his own, the story of stories.”