“She had so much to give, but no one to give it to. She buried all those messy, writhing emotions deep in a hidden secret place and pretended it was okay.”

“She had some hidden reason of her own for attaching great importance to this choosing what her mother was to wear. What was the reason, Mrs. Ramsay wondered, standing still to let her clasp the necklace she had chosen, divining, through her own past, some deep, some buried, some quite speechless feeling that one had for one's mother at Rose's age. Like all feelings felt for oneself, Mrs. Ramsay thought, it made one sad. It was so inadequate, what one could give in return; and what Rose felt was quite out of proportion to anything she actually was. And Rose would grow up; and Rose would suffer, she supposed, with these deep feelings, and she said she was ready now...”

“She had so much love to give - she had always felt that - and now there was somebody to whom she could give this love, and that, she knew, was good; for that is what redeems us, that is what makes our pain and sorrow bearable - this giving of love to others, this sharing of the heart.”

“How remarkable it was, she thought, that we managed to anchor ourselves at all in this world, and that we did so by giving ourselves names and linking those names with places and other people.”

“I watched her perform on the Grammys and she totally sucked. The song 'All I Want to Do is Have Some Fun' sucks and when she walked out of that place with all those Grammies I knew I was going to give mine away. I did. If they're giving them away for crap, I don't want one in my place. What an insult to real music and musicians everywhere.”

“As a girl she had imagined the Milky Way was the curtain of heaven, a notion she had been sorry to abandon as she had grown up. But she would not abandon a belief in heaven itself, wherever that may be, because she felt that if she gave that up then there would be very little left. Heaven may not turn out to be the place of her imagining, she conceded--the place envisaged in the old Botswana stories, a place inhabited by gentle white cattle, with sweet breath--but it would surely be something not too unlike that, at least in the way it felt; a place where late people would be give all that they had lacked on this earth--a place of love for those who had not been loved, a place where those who had had nothing would find they had everything the human heart could desire.”