“Isn't that part of love, I wanted to ask, carrying someone else's ghosts for them?”

“What I really wanted to do was linger in the tidy lines that Marcus had scored into the earth. I wanted to sit in the exact center of the spiral and wait for the plants to unfurl themselves. I wanted them to climb and rove over my limbs until I burst into bloom with them.”

“Well, the way I see it, honey, love's love, whatever shape it comes in.”

“Whatever you ever saw in that mirror left it long ago and became part of you. No one can steal that.”

“Maybe the heavens were a kind of celestial grave, I thought, the way the earth is a repository for our flesh, and when we stared at the stars, we were really beholding a million lives twinkling back at us, asking us not to forget.”

“Make sure you don't lose your heart living with Robert Morgan. Make sure he doesn't use up all the very best parts of you.”

“I looked at my sister's white knees nestled together like a pair of Brenda's eggs and had the urge, not for the first time, to crack her right open. I wanted to pick her ribs apart until I got to the messy center of her - surely somewhere inside my sister there must be some sort of mess, I thought - and dip my fingers in”