“Mothers were the only ones you could depend on to tell the whole, unvarnished truth.”

“If you were lucky, very lucky indeed, there were one or two people in your life who you could tell the unvarnished truth too, shell and egg. And that these people held the essence of you inside them. The rest would be conversations that ended when night fell, or the dinner part ended.”

“Only children tell the whole truth, you know. That's what makes them children.”

“There are two truths," said Katie finally. "As a mother, I say it would have been a terrible thing for a girl to sleep with a stranger--a man she had known less than forty-eight hours. Horrible things might have happened to you. Your whole life might have been ruined. As your mother, I tell you the truth. "But as a woman..." she hesitated. "I will tell you the truth as a woman. It would have been a very beautiful thing. Because there is only once that you love that way.”

“What manner of people they were only books and other people could tell... and the tale was a long and gory one dating from the dim, conjectural dawn of history. But being human they were as apt to change as mother nature to remain constant.”

“So many versions of just one memory, and yet none of them were right or wrong. Instead, they were all pieces. Only when fitted together, edge to edge, could they even begin to tell the whole story.”