“Being a mother is like trying to hold a wolf by the ears,” Gram said. “If you have three or four –or more – chickabiddies, you’re dancing on a hot griddle all the time. You don’t have time to think about anything else. And if you’ve only got one or two, it’s almost harder. You have room left over – empty spaces that you think you’ve got to fill up.”

“My granny Torrelli says when you are angry with someone, so angry you are thinking hateful things, so angry maybe you want to punch them, then you should think of the good things about them, and the nice things they've said, and why you liked them in the first place.”

“Sometimeswhen you are trying not to think about somethingit keeps popping back in your headyou can't help ityou think about itand think about itand think about ituntil your brainfeels likea squashed pea.”

“I could tell you an extensively strange story, I warned.Oh, good! Gram said. Delicious!”

“By the time I got to the bottom, I understood what Guthrie ment when he shouted LIBERO! It was a celebration of being alive.”

“Don't judge a man until you have walked two moons in his moccasins.”

“That night I kept thinking about Pandora's box. I wondered why someone would put a good thing as Hope in a box with sickness and kidnapping and murder. It was fortunate that it was there, though. If not, people would have the birds of sadness nesting in their hair all the time, because of nuclear war and the greenhouse effect and bombs and stabbings and lunatics.There must have been another box with all the good things in it, like sunshine and love and trees and all that. Who had the good fortune to open that one, and was there one bad thing down there in the bottom of the good box? Maybe it was Worry. Even when everything seems fine and good, I worry that something will go wrong and change everything.”