“That's why I'm compelled to tell this story - don't we all have one secret that has shaped us we are burning to reveal? - to convince myself that I'm entitled to my own life.”

“If there is a particular time that defined the clear yet inaudible sound of a life beginning to unwind, this was it, the moment before her life began to spin off course, like the point in a novel at which everything that has come before turns and past events reveal their significance. Yet we didn't see it.”

“We enter people's lives and then realize we've walked into a deep and long history that shapes and gives form to our every moment.”

“There are certain things in life for which we can never be prepared.”

“I suppose no one is truly dead when we go on loving them.”

“She believes that her daughter was in agony and that she chose not to suffer; she needs to believe that through her death Kim now lives on a higher plane. "Why else are flowers so beautiful?" she says to me. "why is the sky such a perfect shade of blue? There has to be more than the here and now.”

“We do not want to comprehend that people may and do die of emotional pain, or to recognize the terror in ourselves when we cannot seem to help someone in despair -- when our words are empty.”