“I want to go to the mother, take her hand, and tell her that although she and her daughter believe that every bad choice the daughter has ever made in life is her fault, it's not. It's really, really not.”

“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.”

“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.”

“It's not always easy being her daughter.' I think,' she said, 'sometimes it's hard no matter whose daughter you are.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Every Mother contains her daughter in herself and every daughter her mother and every mother extends backwards into her mother and forwards into her daughter.”