“She needed to recover. His father had died in January; it was only the end of May. They needed to stick to the routine they'd established during the intervening months. in that way, their life would return to its original shape, like a spring stretched in bad times but contracting eventually into happiness. That the world could come permanently unsprung had never occurred to him.”

“All ghost stories come to this, she understood. All ghost stories end in one of two ways: You are dead or I am dead. If people only understood this, Portia thought, they would never be frightened, they would only need to ask themselves, Who among us has died?And then she occurred to her that she was the ghost in her story. She had spent years haunting her own life, without ever noticing.”

“From childhood I had never believed in permanence, and yet I had longed for it. Always I was afraid of losing happiness. This month, next year...death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again forever.”

“She had had affairs over the years ... but she had never been pregnant, never been a mother or a wife and it was only when she realized that it was too late, that it could never be, that she understood what it was that she had lost. Pamela's life would go on after she was dead, her descendants spreading through the world like the waters of a delta, but when Ursula died she would simply end. A stream that ran dry.”

“It had never occurred to me that I could do something without permission. 'May I' was a way of life for a girl like me.”

“Like her father, he wasn't comfortable sharing his thoughts and feelings. She tried to explain that she needed to be closer to him, but it had never seemed to make a difference.”