“What filled the rooms of Grete's cottage so decidedly were woven baskets and wooden boxes and clay pots glazed in red and blue, each with its own mishmash of this and that. Roots and leaves still redolent of dirt. Balls of scratchy wool-purple twining into pink easing into periwinkle fading into gray. At least three boxes held squares and strips of fabric, all colors, and eight pots overflowed with apples. The walls were lined with shelves, the shelves were lined with books. Wordless spines peered out. As soon as Isabelle saw them, she itched to open it up and read it from cover to cover.”

“Perhaps you'll apprentice to a healer when you're older," Grete suggested. "I'd say you have the gift for it."Hen reddened, then seemed suddenly fascinated with a speck on her shoe. "Be nice to have a gift for something," she said after a moment. "But they don't let girls apprentice, now, do they?"Grete harrumphed. "A bunch of fools, the lot who came up with that system. You lose half the world's brainpower that way.”

“I like your mama,' Trena tells me. 'She seems like good people.''Smile!' my mom calls to me from across the room, and I look at her and smile. Because she is good people. And she means well, even if she does drive me crazy.”

“You can't expect a person to love an animal they might see decapitated at any minute. It ain't realistic," I told Miss Blue, who was gulping down her worm. She looked up at me like it shocked her to learn that some chickens got treated that way.”

“He was a big talker, someone who liked words for words' sake, the sound of them, the way you can pile them up in your mouth and make a poem if you speill them out the right way.p92”

“Granny sat down on the step and stared off into the trees. "That girl right there, she was my only child. I have lost two husbands, one by death, the other by divorce, and I have lost my parents and my brothers and sisters. But nothing ever pierced me to the core like that little girl's dying. I know it wasn't your daddy's fault. I know I messed up by filling a report to Social Services. Is that what you want to here? Is that what it takes for you not to be mad at me?”

“That was a funny thing about friends, Marylin thought. You could know a person practically your whole life and she could still surprise you.”