“Sometimes you have to show them what they want to see in order to get them to show you who they really are.”

“Sometimes you meet yourself on the road before you have a chance to learn the appropriate greeting. Faced with your own possibilities, the hard part is knowing a speech is not required. All you have to say is yes.”

“You can't save a person who doesn't want to be saved. It was like Mr. Eddie always told the new gardeners: Everybody's got to kill their own snakes.”

“When you're young, there's a whole lot of stuff you say you'll never do. Once you get a little older, the list tends to get shorter.”

“Sometimes the contradictions in their lives are so intense they seem manufactured for teaching life lessons, but it's hard to keep up with what you're supposed to be learning in that terrible moment between defiance and despair when all your energy is going into figuring out why it took so long to name the thing that's driving you crazy. At those moments, the best I can do is keep quiet and say a little prayer, which is what I did.”

“Any time your life is at stake and you can't find even one woman to come forward and say, 'This is a good man,' your problem isn't what kind of woman THEY are. Your problem is what kind of men YOU are.”

“We danced too wild, and we sang too long, and we hugged too hard, and we kissed too sweet, and howled just as loud as we wanted to howl, because by now we were all old enough to know that what looks like crazy on an ordinary day looks a lot like love if you catch it in the moonlight.”