“There was so much we had done to ourselves, so much we said in our sessions that our hearts were rent with sorrow. There is so much that happens to the human heart that is in the realm of the unthinkable, the unknowable, the unbearable. (95)”

“Even if we choose to sever the ties to all we ever knew as home, to redefine the spaces we live in, the emotions that seem most natural to us, the ways we have of loving, there is a haunting feeling of loss and admiration for the people we knew first and best. Even if we never speak to them again, they are our first and purest loves. There is, for all of us, a time in which they meant the world. Sometimes, that time lasts as long as we live. It is eternal as breath. It is changeless and deathless. Sometimes, it ends at a very early age. Sometimes, we cannot help ourselves. Things happen. (203)”

“It is the tenderness that breaks our hearts. The loveliness that leaves us stranded on the shore, watching the boats sail away. It is the sweetness that makes us want to reach out and touch the soft skin of another person. And it is the grace that comes to us, undeserving though we may be.”

“Sometime, Mrs. Truitt, we work very hard at something, we exhaust ourselves to accomplish something which seems vital to us." He chose his words with care. "Our best hope for happiness. And sometimes we find that thing, only to find it has simply not been worth the effort.”

“Then there was survival. There was going on, as she had always gone on, without much joy, against her will, against her instincts, without the stomach for it, but on and on and on, without relief, without release, without a hand to reach out and touch her heart. Without kindness or comfort. But on. Forced into such poverty, imprisoned in such despair, there was only one thing she was sure she could do. She could survive.”

“But I told my grandmother, and she listened, and then she said, "Don't ever tell this story to anybody else. If you tell this story to anybody else, something terrible will happen. Something terrible will happen to our family." And then she had a lot to do. (174)”

“Her true heart, however, was buried so far inside her, so gone beneath the vast blanket of her lies and deceptions and whims. Like her jewels now beneath the snow, it lay hidden until some thaw might some to it. She had no way of knowing, of course, whether this heart she imagined herself to have was, in fact, real in any way. Perhaps it was like the soldier's severed arm that keeps throbbing for years, or like a broken bone that aches at the approach of a storm. Perhaps the heart she imagined was one she had never really had at all. But how did they do it, those women she saw on the street, laughing with their charming or their ill-tempered children in restaurants, in train stations, everywhere around her? Any why was she left out of the whole sentimental panorama she felt eddying around her every day of her life?”