“She'd seen it with Isabelle, the way things could become so permeated with memories that story was more important than function.”

“In a time of social fragmentation, vulgarity becomes a way of life. To be shocking becomes more important - and often more profitable - than to be civil or creative or truly original.”

“The event itself played over in her mind, and the role she'd taken in the police investigation, the things she'd told them - worse, the thing she hadn't - made the panic so bad sometimes that she could hardly breathe. No matter where she went at Greenacres - inside the house or out in the garden - she felt trapped by what she'd seen and done. The memories where everywhere, they were inescapable; made worse because the event that caused them was utterly inexplicable.”

“The most important thing she'd learned over the years was that there was no way to be a perfect mother and a million ways to be a good one.”

“She understood his passion because she felt the same way: as if nothing was more important than the touch of her skin to his, as if she'd die if he left her.”

“Stories are a kind of thing, too. Stories and objects share something, a patina. I thought I had this clear, two years ago before I started, but I am no longer sure how this works. Perhaps a patina is a process of rubbing back so that the essential is revealed, the way that a striated stone tumbled in a river feels irreducible, the way that this netsuke of a fox has become little more than a memory of a nose and a tail. But it also seems additive, in the way that a piece of oak furniture gains over years and years of polishing, and the way the leaves of my medlar shine.”