“Grief is natural,' she said. 'Overcoming it is a matter of choice.”

“Eating is natural. Gaining weight is your choice.”

“What lingered after them was not life, which always overcomes natural death, but the most trivial list of mundane facts: a clock ticking on a wall, a room dim at noon, and the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself.”

“She lost much of her appetite. At night, an invisible hand kept shaking her awake every few hours. Grief was physiological, a disturbance of the blood. Sometimes a whole minute would pass in nameless dread - the bedside clock ticking, the blue moonlight coating the window like glue - before she`d remember the brutal fact that had caused it.”

“When asked why she had tried to kill herself, she said only, "It was a mistake.”

“She had given birth to me and nursed me and brought me up. She had known me before I knew myself and now she had no say in the matter. Life started out one thing and then suddenly turned a corner and became something else.”

“She leaned toward him and said in a quiet voice, "Are you Christian?"Mitchell hesitated to answer. The worst thing about religion was religious people.”