“What were the living dead, Wolgast thought, but a metaphor for the misbegotten march of middle age?”

“It was what you did, Wolgast understood; you started to tell a story about who you were, and soon enough the lies were all you had and you became that person.”

“Wolgast leaned back in his chair and realized how exhausted he was. It always came upon him like this, like the sudden unclenching of a fist.”

“The progress of her aging seemed to occur in fits and starts, not so much a matter of physical growth as a deepening self-possession, as if she were coming into ownership of her life.”

“Special Agent Brad Wolgast hated Texas. He hated everything about it.[...] He hated the billboards and the freeways and the faceless subdivisions and the Texas flag, which flew over everything, always as big as a circus tent; he hated the giant pickup trucks everybody drove, no matter that gas was thirteen bucks a gallon and the world was slowly seaming itself to death like a package of peas in a microwave. He hated the boots and the belts and the way people talked, ya'll this and ya'll that, as if they spent the day ropin' and ridin', not cleaning teeth and selling insurance and doing the books, like people did everywhere.”

“What strange places our lives can carry us to, what dark passages.”

“Mary adored her mother with a hopeless affection, like an unrequited crush. She understood this feeling was common in middle children, as Mary was, but there was also a story.”