“Every woman needs secrets,' her mother said with a smile then, her eyes meeting Sally's in the rearview mirror. 'Remember that when you're old like me, pumpkin, because the world has a way of making a woman's life everyone else's business--you have to dig out a little place that's only yours.”

“When a woman makes the choice to marry, to have children, in one way her life begins but in another way it stops. You build a life of details. You become a mother, a wife and you stop and stay steady so that your children can move. And when they leave they take your life of details with them. And then you're expected to move again only you don't remember what moves you because no one has asked in so long. Not even yourself.”

“And that's the insult of it, how always it comes back to a woman being a "good" mother in the world's eyes or a "bad" mother, how everything in a woman's life is funneled through her body between her legs.”

“The best words I ever heard about making your own reputation," Gram said, looking over her shoulder into the back seat, "is that you come into the world crying while everyone is smiling at the miracle of you, and you should live your life so when you leave it, you're smiling, but everyone else is crying because the miracle of you is gone.”

“You've gone mad. What's driven you to this nonsense?""You have," he snarled. "You, with your pretty gray eyes and your smile and the way you speak your mind. The sound of your laugh, your tears when something makes you sad." He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to imagine anyone else who had ever made him feel the way he did when he was with her. Emptiness looked back at him. There wasn't anyone else. "You're the only woman I've ever… liked.”

“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.”