“She quoted a dead playwright and called me a bullet with nothing but a future. She understood my lack of self-pity. She knew why I despised everything that might restrict my forward momentum. She knew that bullets have no conscience. They speed past things and miss their marks as often as they hit them.”

“It is only glass, you know. Nothing fine or grand.Your Mother knew it, when she accepted it with my hand.And she knew I danced as well as a tree. She knew about the politics and duties and responsibilities of marrying into royalty. She knew all those...unfortunate things. Things some people might even call ghastly.”

“Mama was amazing like that; I spent most of my teenage years assuming that she knew nothing about me, and all of my twenties realizing that she knew everything.”

“She had everything she wanted, but she still felt, at times, that there were other things she might want if she knew about them.”

“I didn't want to kill her; she was just doing her job. But she was standing between me and the rest of my miserable life, so she was going to have to take a bullet.”

“She often told her children that they couldn't change the past and they couldn't jump forward to the future. All they had was today, and they needed to live it in such a way that they wouldn't create just another regretted yesterday. Mourning the past was never productive-she knew this full well.”