“In the fall he picked up his phone one afternoon to hear Grandma Lynn.'Jack,' my grandmother announced, 'I am thinking of coming to stay.' My father was silent, but the line was riddled with his hesitation.'I would like to make myself available to you and the children. I've been knocking around in this mausoleum long enough.''Lynn, we're just beginning to start over again,' he stammered. Still, he couldn't depend on Nate's mother to watch Buckley forever. Four months after my mother left, her temporary absence was beginning to take on the feel of permanence. My grandmother insisted. I watched her resist the remaining slug of vodka in her glass. 'I will contain my drinking until'- she thought hard here- 'after five o'clock, and,' she said,' what the hell, I'll stop altogether if you should find it necessary.''Do you know what you're saying?'My grandmother felt a clarity from her phone hand down to her pump-encased feet. 'Yes, I do. I think'It was only after he got off the phone that he let himself wonder, Where will we PUT her?It was obvious to everyone. ~pgs 213-214; Grandma Lynn and Jack;”

“Samuel walked out to Lindsey then, and there she was in his arms, my sweet butterball babe, born ten years after my fourteen years on Earth: Abigail Suzanne. Little Susie to me. Samuel placed Susie on a blanket near the flowers. And my sister, my Lindsey, left me in her memories, where I was meant to be.”

“The relationship with the words someone uses is more intimate and integrated than just a quick read and a blurb can ever be. This intimacy - the words on the page being sent back and forth from engaged editor to open author - is unique in my experience.”

“I like gardening - it's a place where I find myself when I need to lose myself.”

“I wake up very early in the morning. I like to start in the dark, and I never work at night, because my brain is evaporated by 4 P.M.”

“For me the saddest thing was that these animals smelled the brokenness in him – the human defect – and kept away.”

“I could not imagine my youngest standing above her soiled grandmother in the wing chair and saying, "mother, let's kill her. "That's the only choice.”

“Oh sweetheart, do you really think if youseal it up, that the pain's gonna go away?”

“She wasn't actually speaking to me, she was singing a kind of lullaby of talk. But, eventually, the music stopped. ”

“There were also the Masters of Arcane Knowledge. Everyone begrudged their presence among the gifteds. These were the kids that could break down an engine and build it back again - no diagrams or instructions needed. They understood things in a real, not theoretical, way. They seemed not to care about their grades.”

“No one can pull anyone back from anywhere. You save yourself or you remain unsaved.”