“I know your mother lives in your head - almost everyone's mother does, I guess - but you can't let her have her way on this one”

“I don't want to hear the scary part. But at the same time she does want to hear the scary part, everyone wants to hear the scary part, we're all mad here, and her mother really did say that if you told your dreams they wouldn't come true, which meant you were supposed to tell the nightmares and save the good ones for yourself, hide them like a tooth under the pillow.”

“But listen to me, all three of you, n hear this if you don't hear nothing else: everything I did, I did for love . . . the love a natural mother feels for her children. That's the strongest love there is in the world, and it's the deadliest. There's no bitch on earth like a mother frightened for her kids.”

“My girl has got a bun in her oven, and I guess you know who did the damn cooking.”

“What chance?’ she had asked, bewildered.‘Your chance. Your chance to live your own life. Right now you have the look of a woman who is seeing ghosts. Not everybody believes in ghosts, but I do. Do you know what they are, Trisha?’She had shaken her head slowly.‘Men and women who can’t get over the past,’ Aunt Evvie said. ‘That’s what ghosts are. Not them.’ She flapped her arm toward the coffin which stood on its bands beside the coincidentally fresh grave. ‘The dead are dead. We bury them, and buried they stay.”

“I know life is hard, I think everyone knows that in their hearts, but why dos it have to be cruel, as well? Why does it have to bite?”

“There's no bitch on earth like a mother frightened for her kids.”