“As it happened, I didn't grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I want to hear.”

“I have never been out of my own land before. And if I had known what the world outside was like, I don't think I should have had the heart to leave it.' 'Not even to see fair Lothlorien?' said Haldir. 'The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.”

“I have come to realize that what is important is not my loss and the pain it caused but the fact that I have picked myself up (with help), taken the memories and the lessons, and becoming the woman they have wanted me to become.The fact that I have lost those I love is not what defines me. What defines me is the fact that I have survived and now live, despite the pain and with memory of their love.”

“There are tiny, dirty rabbit holes that you have not been down that I have. I have taken people down into those tunnels with me, and they've never come out.”

“Although I have been through all that I have, I do not regret the many hardships I met, because it was they who brought me to the place I wished to reach.”

“Although I am a person who expected to be rooted in one spot forever, as it has turned out I love having the memories of living in many places.”