“I couldn't help but think of my mother's most life-altering mistake. Silly and romantic, getting married fresh out of high school to a man she barely knew, then producing me a year later. She'd always promised me that she had no regrets, that I was the best gift hr life had ever given her.”

“She cried because she'd had such high, high hopes about the Wheelers tonight and now she was terribly, terribly, terribly disappointed. She cried because she was fifty six years old and her feet were ugly and swollen and horrible; she cried because none of the girls had liked her at school and none of the boys had liked her later; she cried because Howard Givings was the only man who'd ever asked her to marry him, and because she'd done it, and because her only child was insane.”

“I had asked her for help, and she had sent me to the lions. I knew that she was trying to save her little girl, but sometimes mothers with the best intentions kill their daughters all the same.”

“When I met her, I saw her as someone else who needed saving but she had saved me. She had given me hope when I had given up on everything in my life.”

“I couldn't for the life of me figure out how long a person had to live, or how good she had to be, to get her hands on some treasure.”

“[Her life] had taken on the shape of a terrible mistake. She hadn't been given the proper tools to make a real life with, she decided, that was it. She'd been given a can of gravy and a hair-brush and told, "There you go." She'd stood there for years, blinking and befuddled, brushing the can with the brush.”