“Here she was, being rescued by a socialist, feminist, lesbian, baby-killing, foreign terrorist. What would the ladies in the sewing circle say to that?”

“FIRST TIME I LAID eyes on Laura McAllan she was out of her head with mama worry. When that mama worry takes ahold of a woman you can’t expect no sense from her. She’ll do or say anything at all and you just better hope you ain’t in her way. That’s the Lord’s doing right there. He made mothers to be like that on account of children need protecting and the men ain’t around to do it most of the time. Something bad happen to a child, you can be sure his daddy gone be off somewhere else. Helping that child be up to the mama. But God never gives us a task without giving us the means to see it through. That mama worry come straight from Him, it make it so she can’t help but look after that child. Every once in awhile you see a mother who ain’t got it, who just don’t care for her own baby that came out of her own body. And you try and get her to hold that baby and feed that baby but she won’t have none of it. She just staring off, letting that baby lay there and cry, letting other people do for it. And you know that poor child gone grow up wrong-headed, if it grows up at all.”

“I figure if there is a God, She's good and surged right now about the state of things down here.”

“She was inexorably in motion, on her way to a fate that would not include him, and though she missed him still, she was conscious that something had shifted inside her since she'd seen him on the vid. Through some unknown agency, the roar of his loss had diminished to a loud rumble, and the waves had spent much of their fury. The hold he'd left inside her was beginning to knit itself closed, and if she squinted, she could see that one day far in the distance, all that would remain of it would be a ragged seam, sensitive to the touch perhaps, but no longer tender.”

“What we can't speak, we say in silence.”

“She experienced a moment of incandescent wonder, a sense of being connected, not just to these people, but to everyone and everything alive: every beating heart, every fluttering wing, every green shoot thrusting itself up out of the earth, seeking, as she was, the sun.”

“One by one, she conjured all the boxes she'd been put into: The good girl box and the good Christian box...the mistress box...the bad daughter and fallen woman boxes...She saw with a painful blaze of clarity that every one of these boxes had been of her own making, either by consent or lack of resistance. She had no right to bitterness; she had put herself in them. And she would get herself out, she vowed. And once she was out, she'd never willingly climb into another box again.”