“The girl slid into the back seat of the town car, tugging at the hem of her dress like she was afraid she might leave a stain on the upholstery.”

“The last image I had of her was her sitting on the platform at Thorpe as a group of people stared at this distressed, weeping woman, and then her charging towards the glass of my window seat as the train pulled out of the station. I had gasped, thinking she meant to throw herself under the wheels, but no, she had simply wanted to attack me, that was all. If she had got her hands on me, she might have killed me. And I might have let her.”

“so my grandmother was not without humanity. and if she wore cocktail dresses when she labored in the garden, they were cocktail dresses she no longer intended to wear to cocktail parties. even in her rose garden she did not want to appear underdressed. if the dresses got too dirty from gardening, she threw them out. when my mother suggested to her that she might have them cleaned, my grandmother said, "what? and have those people at the cleaners what i was doing in a dress to make it that dirty?"from my grandmother i learned that logic is relative.”

“She cried for herself, she cried because she was afraid that she herself might die in the night, because she was alone in the world, because her desperate and empty life was not an overture but an ending, and through it all she could see was the rough, brutal shape of a coffin.”

“The girl might be gorgeous under normal circumstances, but she was an ugly crier.”

“she called it a paper town. Like, you know, everything so fake and flimsy.”

“She didn't leave me enough to discover her, but she left me enough to rediscover the Great Perhaps.”