“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.”

“So much is exploding inside of me that I feel like a bag of Orville Redenbacher's in the microwave. Too much has happened all at once. I stagnated for years with nothing happening, and now, all in one day, too much is happening.”

“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 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 guess that's what my dad did. Stopped agreeing with reality. I could do it for as long as it took me to get from my classroom to the office. He managed it for sixteen years. He must have had more mental discipline than me. Or maybe it wasn't that much of an effort to pretend that I didn't exist.”

“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 guess I have to thank Shupe and all that marching for something, because my butt is as springy as a bag of Gummi Bears.”