“Dwelling on pain, spending too much time immersed in it, tasting its flavors, fingering its textures--this makes it only more potent.”

“...he says he can't see why I didn't "just" tell the truth. but the truth is denser than he can imagine, yet it's more delicate than my body; it's more complicated than any love that ever passed between the two of us.”

“I am neither religious nor superstitious, but there is something otherworldly about the space where two roads come together. The devil is said to set up shop there if you want to swap your soul for something more useful. If you believe that God can be bribed, it's also the hallowed ground to make sacrifices. In the literal sense, it's also a place to change direction, but once you've changed it, you're stuck until you come to another crossroads, and who knows how long that will be.”

“It's funny how three or four notes of anger can be struck at once, creating the perfect chord of fury.”

“The key to life," he told me once, "is to avoid the highs and the lows. It's the peaks and valleys that mess you up.”

“And this is how it started. Just with coffee and the exchange of their long stories. Love can be incremental. Predicaments, too. Coffee can start a life just as it can start a day. This was the meeting of two people who were destined to love from before they were born, from before they made choices that would complicate their lives. This love just rolled toward my mother as though she were standing at the bottom of a steep hill. Mother had no hand in this, only heart.”

“If there was ever a time to boil up some grits it is now.”