“If you need something from somebody always give that person a way to hand it to you.”

“I'd heard August say more than once, "If you need something from somebody, always give that person a way to hand it to you." T. Ray needed a face-saving way to hand me over, and August was giving it to him.”

“The world will give you that once in awhile, a brief timeout; the boxing bell rings and you go to your corner, where somebody dabs mercy on your beat-up life.”

“The first week at August's was a consolation, a pure relief. The world will give you that once in a while, a brief time-out; the boxing bell rings and you go to your corner, where somebody dabs mercy on your beat-up life.”

“If you aren't giving people something to talk about, you've become too dull.”

“You think you want to know something, and then once you do, all you can think about is erasing it from your mind.”

“My children have always existed at the deepest center of me, right there in the heart/hearth, but I struggled with the powerful demands of motherhood, chafing sometimes at the way they pulled me away from my separate life, not knowing how to balance them with my unwieldy need for solitude and creative expression.”