“Life could be cruel enough these days without the truth making it worse.”

“But history is a faithless teller whose cruel recourse to hindsight makes fools of its actors.”

“Something inside Dolly curled up and died. Things could not have been worse. Except that suddenly they were.”

“Memory is a cruel mistress with whom we all must learn to dance.”

“The event itself played over in her mind, and the role she'd taken in the police investigation, the things she'd told them - worse, the thing she hadn't - made the panic so bad sometimes that she could hardly breathe. No matter where she went at Greenacres - inside the house or out in the garden - she felt trapped by what she'd seen and done. The memories where everywhere, they were inescapable; made worse because the event that caused them was utterly inexplicable.”

“Cassandra wondered at the mind's cruel ability to toss up flecks of the past. Why, as she neared her life's end, her grandmother's head should ring with the voices of people long since gone. Was it always this way? Did those with passage booked on death's silent ship always scan the dock for faces of the long-departed?”

“An expression of infinite wisdom, as if, in those first days of life, the small person retained the knowledge of a lifetime just passed.”