“Did she ever think of that, that things experienced in ways different from hers were equally valuable? That the way that he chose to love her was, in fact, loving her, that the face of love depended on the person giving it?”

“Nothing helped until the day she took a tablet and pencil into the basement and moved the event out of her and onto paper, where it was reshaped into a kind of simple equation: loss equaled the need to love again, more.”

“This is the way things work sometimes, that good things get ideas from each other, say, well now let’s go ahead and let her have it all.”

“...and there is such honesty and innocence to her voice I want to hold her. The bedside lamplight is a rich golden color, and it is falling on her face in a way that makes it seem gilded. For a moment, L.D. looks to me like an angel. Another case of illusion only being the larger truth.”

“Nona leans forward, "I had-a love."I nod."You know how it was? It was like-a trees. Oak and elm." Her voice has been soft, like it was lost in memory, but now she stares at me, her eyes narrowed, and she makes a fist and pounds the side of her chair. "The roots, they bound-a together, but the trees, they are free. You know what it's-a mean?”

“People are stupid. Why are they so stupid? There is an algorithm for the way humans were designed: love and be loved. Follow it andyou’re happy. Fight against it and you’re not. It’s so simple, it’s hard to understand.”

“I am thinking about the way that life can be so slippery; the way that a twelve-year-old girl looking into the mirror to count freckles reaches out toward herself and that reflection has turned into that of a woman on her wedding day, righting her veil. And how, when that bride blinks, she reopens her eyes to see a frazzled young mother trying to get lipstick on straight for the parent/teacher conference that starts in three minutes. And how after that young woman bends down to retrieve the wild-haired doll her daughter has left on the bathroom floor, she rises up to a forty-seven-year-old, looking into the mirror to count age spots.”