“I think we're just different sorts of people, me and you. You're a planner. Everything has to be perfectly aligned before you make a move, or you're afraid the whole damn world will come crashing down. For me, it's more like, "We're having a baby. Now what?”

“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.”

“Kids are amazing. The first few months, they're just like these loaves of bread that shit. You're wondering what the hell you got yourself into. But then, they turn into people. It's the most incredible thing I've ever seen.”

“If things had been different, she would be in Carolyn's place right now. She didn't want that sort of existence, but there was something so attractive about the security of feeling like you had stopped moving toward your life, and actually arrived.”

“A kid thinks her mother is just that -- hers. A mother is also a woman, an independent being, who doesn't want to be reminded by anyone, child or otherwise, of her tree-trunk thighs. The world made women's private lives a public affair to people who knew them and even people who didn't.”

“April's just a Dixie cup of crazy. Lydia's more like a twenty-gallon tank”

“even if there was no God there was always the ocean- before you and after you, breathing in and out for all eternity.”