I think part of her feared that if Mother could leave her that way, she must be unlovable. And of course, she wasn’t.

Being together, like being able to see certain stars only with your peripheral vision, isn’t something you can create. It’s just something that happens to you.

My mother smoked too but I guessed by now she had quit the habit, which was, I supposed, one of the advantages of being shipwrecked.

Some people, well, most people just seem to show up on your life with no clear purpose. Have you noticed that? They’re like dust mites. You know they’re there, you just don’t know what to do about them.

The library in summer is the most wonderful thing because there you get books on any subject and read them each for only as long as they hold your interest, abandoning any that don’t, halfway or a quarter of the way through if you like, and store up all that knowledge in the happy corners of your mind for your own self and not to show off how much you know or spit it back at your teacher on a test paper.

I left parts of myself some places and found others unexpectedly. New people appeared on the scene and others disappeared before I had a chance to say goodbye. All kinds of ordinary people gave their whole hearts to things you wouldn’t think you could give your heart to.

The only really interesting thing about someone that makes you want to explore them further is their heart, and Miss Honeycut has a teeny tiny pea-sized one and it takes you nowhere you want to go.

Suddenly I realize that everyone in the whole world is, at the end of a day, staring at a dusky horizon, owner of a day that no one else will ever know.

The richness of our lives depends on what we are willing to notice and what we are willing to believe.

I want someone who puts the whole ball of wax at risk. I want the kind of marriage where we would follow each other out into the stormy fatal sea or I’m not marrying at all.