“...for there is nothing so perfect as a thing with no ending and no beginning, such as a family of souls intertwined.”

“She wished with one part of her soul this weren’t real and with the other that it was, but wasn’t it just another goodbye either way?”

“A mixed up knot of incompatible roles, tied up too tight to know where one ended and another began.”

“And maybe then when they were all a family, Tommy would be able to see what Mary used to see, what his other children saw, not just a man who would kill for them but a man who would die for them...the man underneath it all.”

“It was a sickening, humbling, maddeningly powerless sensation this watching them and waiting for them to come to him. For the time they could be a family again. But Mickey did it like one’s tongue pointlessly finds a mouth sore over and over again, half to see if it was still there, half to see if it still hurt.”

“Every conversation they had anymore it felt like instead of unraveling the mystery, it just further entangled all of them into a twisted never-ending knot.”

“No, nothing much had changed in the old neighborhood. She was still just an actress in someone else’s play.”