“It was beautiful not despite but because of the friction it has had to endure. It had been thrashed around, but instead of being destroyed, it was improved with every scratch and scrape, sculpted. In fact, the scuffs themselves are what gave it its quiet splendor; they are responsible for turning a simple piece of glass (which could have just as easily been trash) into a gem. It wouldn't be the same without the wear and tear; it wouldn't be something pretty enough to be turned into jewelry if it hadn't been damn near broken. I closed my fist around this tear-shaped gem and thought about my own uneven edges, my own abrasions, and things I have endured that have, instead of breaking me, completed me, prepared me for the next tumble. Its odd beauty was hard-won. It came from reinventing itself. From having risen to the top of the discard pile. Like a phoenix, from victim to victor. (325)”

“I spent the next two hours down there, first sitting in the sand, sifting and swirling, watching the grains fall from the webs of my dusty hands and then walking down by the water, collecting those little pieces of beach glass. There were more of them than I thought. They were surprisingly strong. I tried to snap one in half to see if the inside was still shiny and clear like regular glass, but it wouldn't break. Its scuffy exterior was like scar tissue. (67)”

“In a rush, Joan and Timothy and the log cabin and the prayers and even those tough little pieces of beachglass came into my mind, reminding me that the point is to endure, not to break. (71)”

“I wanted to curl up in her lap and stay there forever. I wanted to be her. She was raising me, cultivating me, molding me into a far better version of me than I could have ever dreamed up, let alone lived out, on my own. (149)”

“She told me to keep writing. After my journal filled up, I bought another one. As I wrote and read my entries to Joan, I felt myself metamorphosing. My growth was like the tide, coming in waves, retracting out of reach, coming back. Sometimes undercurrents came, pulling at my feet, sucking the sand out from under them. I dug my toes in hard and closed my eyes and managed to stay mostly upright, but those riptides came anyway, guided by the same moon that looked so benevolent, so white and happy against the indigo sky, so serene and fat and innocent, so far away. (141)”

“I was starting to understand that the more you talked about something the less it hurt, each telling deflating it a little bit more. That was why we had to say it out loud at the beginning of every meeting: My name is Delia and I'm an addict. It was so we could stop flinching and just live with it. (72)”

“As we ate, I watched the waves crashing and thought about the erosion, the turning of rock into sand, and how long it takes to see any difference in the coastline even though it's constantly being worked on. (167)”