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

“And so many things get lost. Not just a set of keys or a photograph of your father with his first truck, but the door those keys once opened, the childhood house you long ago walked into, the father who used to carry you on his shoulders high above the crowds at the summer fair, his body now ashes and shards of bone. You hold these things in place on a page, you walk through that door, touch his face and smell the cigarette smoke on his breath and in his shirt, you make things breathe again in words. You feel the lightness of a ghostly touch across your skin. In that small house on the corner, the porch light suddenly comes on.”

“Mom, mom, mom, mom! A yowl rose from my gut, my bowels, my womb, raw as a birth cry but with no hope in it, a maddening howl, a roar, the water a wailing wall shattering around me. Unsyllabled, thoughtless, the cry rose from the oldest cells in my body. I hadn't known grief could be so primal, so crude. The violence shook me. When it stopped, I fell to my knees in the shower, and the water called to the water in me; I wanted to melt, to run down the drain and under the city to the creek and then to the river thirty miles away. Mom, mom, mom, mom!”

“A few years back, when I finally got smart enough to go to a therapist, she asked me how I had held things together all these years.It didn't take long to come up with an answer. 'That's easy. I belong to a book club”

“If we don’t have dreams, Lilly, what do we have? Besides, aren’t you the one who always says to delight myself in the Lord and He will give me the desires of my heart?”

“When Wade brought you home, I thought, Now here's a girl with a little fire in her. And where there's fire, there's usually smoke.”

“There is a certain type of person who just won't be happy unless she lives in New York at least once in her life.”