“With the Smithies, it was different. There was sometimes no telling where one of them began and the others left off.”

“We don't always do the things our parents want us to do, but it is their mistake if they can't find a way to love us anyway.”

“Women leave their marriages when they can't take any more. Men leave when they find someone new.”

“Every woman needs secrets,' her mother said with a smile then, her eyes meeting Sally's in the rearview mirror. 'Remember that when you're old like me, pumpkin, because the world has a way of making a woman's life everyone else's business--you have to dig out a little place that's only yours.”

“And anyway, once you allowed yourself to picture such a scenario, it couldn't happen. That was just the way life went.”

“With the Smithies, it was different. There was sometimes no telling where one of them began and the others left off.”

“The girls said she was too cynical about love, but how could you not be? On the surface, relations between men and women were all soft kisses and white gowns and hand-holding. But underneath they were a scary, complicated, ugly mess, just waiting to rise to the surface.”

“How could a person have and do all these stupid things--clip coupons and double lock the front door--and then one day just cease to exist?”

“One of life's contradictions: how human beings were at once entirely resilient and impossibly fragile. One decision could stay with you forever, and yet you could live through almost anything.”

“It was amazing that you did not become your grief entirely, and walk about leaking it everywhere.”

“She had learned over time that to know anything was bearable. It was secrecy that could not be borne.”