“When she shines we all bask in her happiness, but when the thunderstorms come in, let me warn you, find a faraway hiding hole." Dorothy Broadbelt, lady in waiting to Queen Elizabeth 1.”

“There's a thin line between genius and bottom-barrel stupidness. I hover delicately on a tightrope between the two, wondering where I'll land if I'll ever fall.”

“Mama says change is God's way of showing us a tender miracle, kinda like the chocolate inside a Tootsie Pop.”

“Taped on the wall was a hand-drawn picture- a stick figure with a bow on the head holding a litterbag.”

“Violet said nothing, though big pearly tears, like a child's, trembled at her lashes. She suddenly missed John very much. Into him she could pour all the inarticulate perceptions, all the knowings and unknowings she felt, which, though he couldn't understand them really, he would receive reverently, and out of him would come then the advice, the warnings, the clever decisions she could never have made.”

“One by one the lights burned out, like long lives come to their expected ends. Then there was a dark house made once of time, made now of weather, and harder to find; impossible to find and not even as easy to dream of as when it was alight. Stories last longer, but only by becoming only stories. It was anyway all a long time ago; the world, we know now, is as it is and not different; if ever there was a time when there were passages, doors, the borders open and many crossing; that time is not now. The world is older than it was. Even the weather isn't as we remember it clearly once being; never lately does there come a summer day such as we remember, never clouds as white as that, never grass as odorous and shade as deep and full of promise as we remember they can be, as once upon a time they were.”

“Her eyes always bothered me when we were kids. They still do. They make mine ache trying to see where they end.”