“None of her spells are planned, but come to her like snatches of poetry or a doodle on a napkin.”

“He makes her feel halfway normal by being so much further beyond her.”

“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.”

“[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.”

“[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.”

“Polly had always marveled . . . that her country would name such a processed and unnatural product [American cheese] after itself, yet hungry Rose . . . gleefully ate every individually wrapped, plastic little one of them.”

“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.”