“How exactly are you supposed to force your way into someone's life? Like I said, I have nothing she wants anymore. Not even, or especially not, my love.”

“I find it hard to hate a man who brings you exactly what you didn't even know you craved.”

“I read once that it takes fourteen miles for an oil tanker to change course. The same change for mothers and daughters must take a nearly equal number of years. But in all those miles and years there does come one precise moment, one discrete point in an infinite vastness, when you start heading in an entirely new direction. I know that, for better or for worse, Aubrey and I have hit that moment when instead of arguing with me, fighting to convince me to accept what she wants, she states in a steady, even way that doesn't ask for my permission or seem ready to bristle when I don't offer it, "Mom, I have to go.”

“I would like whispering with someone who is like me. But no one is.I think it is because my sizzle doesn't match anyone else's. I want something to happen so bad that it sizzles inside of me. It never stops, but it also never fits any of the choices presented.”

“As she swallow a few more drops, I whisper to my child's namesake, "The first of untold numbers of sweet things you will taste in this life." It is my blessing.”

“I shrug and smile amiably the way you do when you're in a foreign country and have no idea what anyone is saying, so you end up grinning and nodding your way into a three-way with a henna vendor and a camel.”

“At almost any time in the past sixteen years, hearing him admit how much the sound of my voice, even channeled through our daughter, still affected him would have felt like winning. Today, it's close to irrelevant.”