“Ruby shook her head, but she smiled, a look that said she loved this man, loved the life they had made together. They seemed utterly comfortable with one another, like they knew each other all the way through.”

“And then there were the things Sally knew her mother would have loved. Those, too, made it easy to imagine how she might come back to life, since nothing good seemed quite real without her there to approve of it.”

“She didn't have a single friend on earth to see her off. She had outlived them all.”

“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.”

“Once this kid came into the world, Sally knew, she would live in constant terror of somehow injuring or losing her. Having her tucked deep inside her belly was the safest she would ever feel about the child, and even that was scary.”

“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.”

“She had once said that she believed the women's liberation movement of the sixties and seventies was actually a ploy by men to get women to do more.”