“Mathilde saw her own face reflected in the window, but no, it was a barn owl on a low branch in the cherry trees. She could barely master herself. She had never expected this. These women, such kindness, their eyes shining in the dim room. They saw her. She didn't know why, but they saw her, and they loved her even still.”

“We need a mass of ancestors at our backs like a balast. Sometimes, we feel it's impossible to push into the future without such a weight behind us, without such heaviness to keep us steady, even if it is imaginary. And the more frightening the future is, the more complicated it seems to be, the more we steady ourselves with the past.”

“a feminist is just someone who recognizes power structures that keep people from having the fullest life they can.”

“In the end, fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies.”

“The stories themselves aren't what moves him now...What moves him are the shadowy people behind the stories, the workers weary from their days, gathering at night in front of a comforting bit of fire...The world then was no less terrifying than it is now, with our nightmares of bombs and disease and technological warfare. Anything held the ability to set of fear...a nail dropped in a the hay, wolves circling at the edge of the woods...”

“His heart...responds to those once-upon-a-time people, anonymous in the shadows, the faith it took them to come together and rest and listen through the gruesomeness, their patience for the ever after, happy or not.”

“Childhood is such a delicate tissue; what they had done this morning could snag somewhere in the little ones, make a dull, small pain that will circle back again and again, and hurt them in small ways for the rest of their lives.”

“He thinks of the rotten parachute they played with as kids in Arcadia: they hurtle through life aging unimaginably fast, but each grasps a silken edge of memory that billows between them and softens the long fall.”

“He will miss this quiet full of noise: the nighthawks, the way the woods breathe, the things moving unsuspected through the dark. But he will take with him the canisters full of blasted images and have the pleasure of living them again. They are not nothing, the memories.”

“Best to distrust this retrospective radiance: gold dust settles over memory and makes it shine.”

“The balls it took to proclaim a creative profession, the narcissism.”