“Wanting to play God for your own private purposes, whatever they are, might be what getting greedy is”

“Amiel was looking at me with the kind of interest that made my mouth dry up. I was Braille and his eyes were fingers.”

“Tu' eres de dos mundos."He was wrong, of course. You can only belong to one world at a time.”

“Even as Camille's beauty and precocity took form, when pride alone might have nurtured proprietary feelings, she never seemed quite the child Judith was meant to call her own.”

“You know, for a while there we kept horses for the boys, and we had a mare that had broken down. Couldn't ride it... You could feed it and brush it and water it and all. Sometimes, I've thought that's what most marriages get to. A horse you still care a little about but cannot any longer ride.”

“It is the first shower that wets." "Marriage is like picking the place where you're going to live for the next fifty years by using a wall map, a blind fold, and what you really, truly, deeply believe is your lucky dart." "Our marriage, like all marriages, was happy until it wasn't”

“It's like picking the place you're going to live for the next fifty years by using a wall map, a blindfold, and what you really, truly, deeply believe is your lucky dart.' Sullenly Judith said, `I don't believe I have a lucky dart,' and her mother cast an unhappy smile her way and said, `You will, though.”