“In becoming dirt, she has been turned to stone. To touch her is to feel a chill.”

“She has spent most of the day reading and is feeling rather out of touch with reality, as if her own life has become insubstantial in the face of the fiction she's been absorbed in.”

“Some secrets are like fossils and the stone has become too heavy to turn over.”

“He cradled her face between his hands, angled his mouth over hers, and welcomed the bliss she offered. Boldly, she gave her tongue the freedom to roam within his mouth. She sighed. He moaned.He thought a man could become spoiled touching a woman. He might never want to touch stone again. Stone wasn't warm. It didn't alter its shape with the gentlest of pressures. Stone didn't breathe so he could feel its moisture on his face. Rocks didn't make soft sounds that he'd carry with him until the day he died.”

“Prayer and love are learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and the heart has turned to stone.”

“But comes a time for a woman when she stops thinking of herself as a girl, as a person of possibilities. She starts looking at the plain facts of herself. Her body that’s become the body that she has and her habits becoming the habits that she’s written in stone. Her “haves” being the ones she’s got and maybe not getting anymore.”