“Crying had made her want a shoulder on which to rest her head, arms to hold her. She'd wasted too many tears alone in her room, her garden, walking along the shore, praying for God to send her someone to share her sorrows along with her joys.”

“I expect she'll walk down the aisle to her groom with a book in her pocket.”

“Please don’t be angry with him. My mither didn’t love him, and he’s still trying to make her.”

“Rafe hadn't sworn in front of a lady since he was fifteen and said something unacceptable in his mother's hearing. Though he'd been twice her size already, she grabbed him by his hair queue and dragged him to her boudoir, where she proceeded to wash his mouth out with lavendar soap. He had been vilely sick, to this day couldn't bear the scent of lavendar, anhd watched his tongue around females of all ages and social rank.”

“Loss makes the soul sick”

“The savage rushing of the river seemed to be inside her head, inside her body. Even when the oarswomen, their guides, were speaking to her, she had the impression she couldn't quite hear them because of the roar. Not of the river that did indeed roar, just behind them, close to the simple shelter they'd made for her, but because of an internal roar as of the sound of a massive accumulation of words, spoken all at once, but collected over a lifetime, now trying to leave her body. As they rose to her lips, and in response to the question: Do you want to go home? she leaned over a patch of yellow grass near her elbow and threw up. All the words from decades of her life filled her throat. Words she had said or had imagined saying or had swallowed before saying to her father, dead these many years. All the words to her mother. To her husbands. Children. Lovers. The words shouted back at the television set, spreading its virus of mental confusion. Once begun, the retching went on and on. She would stop, gasping for breath, rest a minute, and be off again. Draining her body of precious fluid... Soon, exhausted, she was done. No, she had said weakly, I don't want to go home. I'll be all right now.”

“She told her journal about me passing by her in the parking lot, about how on that night I had touched her-literally, she felt it, reached out. What I had looked like then. How she dreamed about me. How she had fashioned the idea that a spirit could be a sort of second skin for someone, a protective layer somehow. How maybe if she was assiduous she could free us both. I would read over her shoulder as she wrote down her thoughts and wonder if anyone might believe her one day. When she was imagining me, she felt better, less alone, more connected to something out there. To someone out there. She saw the corn field in her dreams, and a new world opening, a world where maybe she could find a foothold too. “You’re a really good poet Ruth,” she imagined me saying, and her journal would release her into a daydream of being such a good poet that her words had the power to resurrect me.”