“She was surprised at how deflating his presence was.”

“I'm saying she looks fine on the outside, but inside is somebody who's going to need a man a lot more than he's going to need her.”

“Even as Camille's beauty and precocity took form, when pride alone might have nurtured proprietary feelings, she never seemed quite the child Judith was meant to call her own.”

“Adolescence is a skin we never quite shed.”

“You know, for a while there we kept horses for the boys, and we had a mare that had broken down. Couldn't ride it... You could feed it and brush it and water it and all. Sometimes, I've thought that's what most marriages get to. A horse you still care a little about but cannot any longer ride.”

“Sometimes I think the cover of a book as a door to another world...but other times I think of it as an escape hatch from this one. I guess it's the same thing.”

“It's like picking the place you're going to live for the next fifty years by using a wall map, a blindfold, and what you really, truly, deeply believe is your lucky dart.' Sullenly Judith said, `I don't believe I have a lucky dart,' and her mother cast an unhappy smile her way and said, `You will, though.”