“Sometimes you are in the middle of your destiny before you even know it has begun.”

“Secrets are always hardest at the beginning. After a while they settle in like the cavities in your teeth, and you only think about them when they hurt.”

“[H]e went ahead and named them without her, pulling from the spiral notebook of names they'd been collecting, putting together first and middle names with no rhyme or reason . . . names that obviously didn't flow.”

“If she'd spaced her children out and had eleven babies in eleven years, she would have been no better than her own mother and sisters: irresponsible, a welfare cheat, another bit of Sawdust Lane white trash. But as luck would have it, she'd had them all at once, and now she was, overnight, middle-class. And respectable.”

“God must feel the same at the end of a long day. Stop trying to make Me happy with all that ritual up and down, all the good works and psychic genuflecting. All the good works in the world will not bring you and closer to Me. Stand still. Let Me look at you and find Myself reflected. Maybe for a brief moment, you thought it was all about you, but surprise, Creation. It is all about Me.”

“[N]ames were what you wore forever, and she felt that she'd sent her daughters out in tacky rabbit fur coats when they should have been wrapped in mink.”

“The passion for travelling is, I believe, instinctive in some natures. We have seen men persevere in their enterprises against the most formidable obstacles; and, without means or friends, and even ignorant of the languages of the various countries through which they passed, pursue their perilous journeys into remote places, until, like the knight in the Arabian tale, they succeeded in snatching a memorial from every shrine they visited.”