“Not like me, who would have given anything to shed my cumbersome skin and bones, stripping myself down to marrow, to nothing more than a gambler's heart, which beat fast and true and still believed that somewhere out there, a deck was stacked entirely in my favor.”

“When you get back, I finally wrote, let's lay ourselves down in the fields outside, and sleep there for the night, whatever the weather. We'll let the crows roost on our shoulders and skulls, let them nudge our necks with their wings, and pick at our earlobes, nibbling all the rotten bits out of us until we're nothing more than sinew, bone, and teeth. Until we're so pure, you can see right through us down to the roots and dirt. Until even our memories are eaten alive.”

“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”

“A life passed amid gangsters, thieves, smugglers, and gamblers had granted Amelia an unerring nose for greed, vanity, and other assorted venal characteristics, and in Miss Sparrow, she smelled rancid pride combined with the bitter char of unrequited love. She smelled the lemon tang of loneliness mingling with despair. Just under Priscilla Sparrow's skin, Amelia could tell, a rosemary blast of judiciousness rippled, followed by the must decay of jealousy and a lingering note of envy - in short (and in spite of all of Miss Sparrow's better attempts with Dick Crane), the odors of a lifelong spinster.”

“Of course, this memory makes me sorrowful now, for it anyone ever knew the shape of me, it was Amelia - and not just the outer lines of me, either, but all my innards as well. She was as necessary as the sun to me. She was the quiet heat that shimmered inside my shadow and made it live, and without her, I am a little darker.”

“Amelia and I were at the age where wonderful things sometimes still did happen, but far less often than they used to.”

“Tabitha's quilt was more than pieces of fabric sewn together. It was a patchwork of souls.”