“Who but my mother held those small pieces of my childhood? Where would they go when she was gone?”

“But it wasn't just the distance. It was what had happened to me since these days, those endless, quiet days when I thought my life would always continue in that way. When my life consisted of small, certain pieces of a larger, but basically simple, puzzle.When I was certain that I always knew where each piece fit.”

“Where are the eyes of my childhood, those fearful eyes she had thirty years ago, the eyes that made me?”

“I still loved Granny. It flowed out of my chest. With Granny gone, where would my love go?”

“I wonder now… were my tears for Alex and Al and all the others who had gone and who were yet to go? Or was I weeping for myself…and those who would remain?”

“Dorothy viewed my mother's propensity toward madness not as something to be afraid of, but rather as something to look forward to, like a movie or a newly released color of nail polish.'Your mother is just expressing herself,' Dorothy would tell me when my mother stopped sleeping, started smoking the filters of her cigarettes and began writing backward with a glitter pen. No, she's not,' I would say. 'She's going insane again.' Don't be so mundane,' she would yawn, passing my mother a shoebox filled with cat vertebrae. 'She is a brilliant artist. If you want Hamburger Helper, go find some other mother.”