“Grief is like sinking, like being buried.”

“Grief is like sinking, like being buried. I am in water the tawny color of kicked-up dirt. Every breath is full of choking. There is nothing to hold on to, no sides, no way to claw myself up. There is nothing to do but let go.Let go. Feel the weight all around you, feel the squeezing of your lungs, the slow, low pressure. Let yourself go deeper. There is nothing but bottom. There is nothing but the taste of metal, and the echoes of old things, and days that look like darkness.”

“It's as though the words are trapped, buried under past fears, past lives, like fossils compressed under layers of dirt.”

“This was what being cured was like: like being in a fishbowl, circling always inside the same glass.”

“...the past: It drifts, it gathers. If you are not careful, it will bury you. This is half the reason for the cure: It clean-sweeps; it makes the past, and all its pain, distant, like the barest impression on sparkling glass.”

“I just want to be normal, like everybody else." "Are you sure that being like everybody else will make you happy?”

“It's Connecticut: being like the people around you is the whole point.”