“This is what making love must be like, she thinks. At twelve years old, she understands little more than that it will begin with loss - the loss of virginity, the loss of innocence - but that at some point there stands to be a gain.”

“He loved that she eschewed cursive for print, as he did. Cursive, more than anything, betrayed a person's age.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“All the Baptist churches she's ever visited smelled of the same sweat and boredom.”