“It’s my belief that animals can help a human being travel to the wounds of childhood. The best part is, once you go there, you can fix things. Get on with life.”

“Mothers are only human, you turn it over to God and then you just wing it.”

“Oh, Mama,” I said. “What if I don’t live that long?” My mother didn’t hesitate one second. “By hook or by crook, you will. Having children only increases your grip on the world. It’s like reading a thriller. You can’t put it down because you have to know how the story turns out.”

“A willingness to lose one's self in a story was the first step to learning compassion, to appreciating other cultures, to realizing what possibilities the world held for people who kept at life despite the odds.”

“Juniper laughed for real, but one of those fake smiles he considered a plague of the Caucasian race followed. If you’re sad, be sad, he wanted to say.”

“Sleep is just a good idea. I bow to the god caffeine.”

“In the dresser mirror, my face looks the same, but I feel something happening around me, some change as palpable as weather. Stuck in the mirror are mementos from my childhood—red and yellow ribbons for various underachievements, a brown corsage from grad school graduation, a curling and faded picture of me petting a deer in Wisconsin—which is now over. I wandered through it and came out the other side. It’s a stark feeling. Like getting to the last page of a book and seeing ‘The End.’ Even if you didn’t like the story that much, or your childhood, you read it, you lived it. And now it’s over, book closed, that long-ago deer you petted in the Dells as dead as the one in The Yearling.”