“Then she had been a fiancee, a young wife, and a mother, and she had discovered that these words were far too small ever to contain the experience.”

“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.”

“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.”

“All day she had been dreaming of the comet, its wild and fiery beauty, what it might mean, how her life might change.”

“She had died at age twelve, and by now she was nothing but the memory of love-- nothing, now, but bones.”

“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].”

“But she had felt since childhod that her life would n ot be ordinary. A moment would come- she would know it when she saw it- and everything would change.”