“...so young, so lonely and naive, that she imagined herself as some sort of vessel to be filled up with love. But it wasn't like that. The love was within her all the time and its only renewal came from giving it away.”

“She imagined herself as some sort of vessel to be filled up with love. But it wasn't like that. The love was within her all the time, and its only renewal came from giving it away.”

“There was so much force and beauty in the windows, such unsettled sadness in what little I knew of Rose's life, all her longing, her distance from her daughter. Just knowing she had existed opened new and uneasy possibilities within my understanding of the story I'd always thought I'd known by heart. ... Whoever Rose had been, she was gone, unable to speak for herself, fading into the past as surely as these rainy colors were diffusing, even now [p. 142].”

“She didn't love him and he didn't love her; she was like an addiction, and what they were doing had a darkness to it, a weight.”

“Away from the bright motion of the party, she carried her sadness like a dark stone clenched in her palm.”

“This was her life. Not the life she had once dreamed of, not a life her younger self would ever have imagined or desired, but the life she was living, with all its complexities. This was her life, built with care and attention, and it was good.”

“His love for her was so deeply woven with resentment that he could not untangle the two.”