“There had been so many easy words between them that Daniel was guilty of nodding every now and then and tuning out the excess. He hadn't known, at the time, that he should have been hoarding these, like bits of sea glass hidden in the pocket of a winter coat to remind him that once it had been summer.”

“She had smiled her way through the births andhad offered the new mothers the support and the medical care that they needed, but the momentshe’d sent them on their way, cutting that last umbilical cord between hospital and home, Lacyknew she was giving them the wrong advice. Instead of easy platitudes like Let them eat when theywant to eat and You can’t hold a baby too much, she should have been telling them the truth: Thischild you’ve been waiting for is not who you imagine him to be. You’re strangers now; you’ll bestrangers years from now.”

“Peter tucked the glasses into the front pocket of Jordan’s jacket. “I kind of like knowing you’retaking care of them,” he said. “And there isn’t all that much I really want to see.”Jordan nodded. He walked out of the holding cell and said good-bye to the deputies. Then heheaded toward the lobby, where Selena was waiting.As he approached her, he put on Peter’s glasses. “What’s up with those?” she asked.“I kind of like them.”“You have perfect vision,” Selena pointed out.Jordan considered the way the lenses made the world curve in at the ends, so that he had to movemore gingerly through it. “Not always,” he said.”

“As a child, what I was missing was so much bigger to me than what I had. My mother-mythic, imaginary-was a deity and a superhero and a comfort all at once. If only I'd had her, surely, she would have been the answer to every problem; if only I'd had her , she would have been the cure for everything that ever had gone wrong in my life.”

“She had never been a pretty crier. She sobbed the way she did everything else - with passion and excess.”

“How many times would I throw this away before I realized it was what I had been looking for all along?”

“Can you hate someone for what they have done, but still love them for whom they had been?”