“You can live for a long time inside the shell you were born in. But one day it'll become too small.""Then what?" I ask."Well, then you'll have to find a larger shell to live in."I consider this for a moment. "What if it's too small but you still want to live there?"She sighs. "Gracious, child, what a question. I suppose you'll either have to be brave and find a new home or you'll have to live inside a broken shell.”

“Most people are remarkably resilient. Even those who have been through war or great loss often find reservoirs of strength. But the legacy of trauma is a heavy burden to bear.”

“When something terrible happens, a lifetime of small events and unremarkable decisions, of unresolved anger, and unexplored fears begins to play itself out in ways you least expect. You've been going along from one day to the next, not realizing that all those disparate words and gestures were adding up to something, a conclusion, you didn't anticipate. And later, when you begin to retrace your steps you see that you will need to reach back further than you could have imagined, beyond words and thoughts and even dreams, perhaps to make sense of what happened.”

“I think about all the ways I’ve been perceived by others over the years: as a burden, a dutiful daughter, a girlfriend, a spiteful wretch, an inva”

“It's hard to say what's in my head. It's been a long time since anyone cared to ask.”

“That man would have chipped away at your heart bit by bit until there was nothing left. It may have been bruised, but at least it's whole.”

“I am acutely aware that like a slip of paper in the wind, something in his nature eludes my grasp.”

“This is like telling a person who has leapt off a cliff to be careful. I am already in midair.”

“It's as if she assumes everything will go right, and when it doesn't - which, of course, is pretty often - she is surprised and affronted.”

“Molly is the opposite. So many things have gone wrong for her in her seventeen years that she’s come to expect it. When something does go right, she hardly knows what to think.”

“If you really want to know me, I said, we'll have to start with the witches.”