“She had never been to college, and I often wondered where her life would have led under different circumstances. She might have been a physician or an attorney, a CEO or a professor. Instead, she was stuck in Silvington, Indiana, married to a construction worker, and trying anything she could think of to save her child.”

“Studying the young woman’s long thin legs, Tessa wondered how different her life would have been if she had had legs like that. She could not help but suspect that it would have been almost entirely different.”

“She would wonder what had hurt her when she found her face wet with tears, and then would wonder how she could have been hurt without knowing it.”

“She wondered if she would have tumbled into love with him during the past week if her heart had been whole, if her soul had no been shattered long ago. She rather thought she might have. But a heart and soul could not be mended by the power of the will, she had discovered over seven years. And so she had accepted reality and moved on.”

“She was trying to say something else; she was trying to say that the inability to articulate what one feels in any satisfactory way is one of our enduring tragedies. It wouldn't have been much, and it wouldn't have been useful, but it would have been something that reflected the gravity and the sadness inside her. Instead, she had snapped at him for being a loser. It was as if she were trying to find a handhold on the boulder of her feelings, and had merely ended up with grit under her nails.”

“If she had only known, things might have been different between us, but I could never talk to her about it"[Jimmy about Molly]”