“Your eyes are everything. (Maybe why some people give up on talking.)”

“Conner hadn’t liked leaving the gravesite with his father still not buried. But he’d learned from his grandmother’s funeral that you have to go. It’s expected. Nobody hangs around the cemetary. Grief—a little or a lot—is tucked into your pocket and carried away.”

“If you don’t deal with the past, the past deals with you.”

“Take a plain-Jane rock and polish it, and you'll find a gem.”

“If grace is so wonderful, why do we have such difficulty recognizing and accepting it? Maybe it's because grace is not gentle or made-to-order. It often comes disguised as loss, or failure, or unwelcome change.”

“I was too scared to open my eyes. It was the logic of a child; if you don't open your eyes, the monster won't see you.”

“He said that some people can live from birth to death and have no more thoughts in their heads about the reasons for living than a beetle. But that we were different, he and I. We needed more than a clod of dirt to make our rising up and lying down worth something.”