It’s life. You don’t figure it out. You just climb up on the beast and ride.

There is the truth of history, and there is the truth of what a person remembers. As {she} sat at the edge of {the lake}, memory blossoms floated unbounded, as though breathed, no words spoken. Like birds that fly across national borders, between countries at war at each other.

...you do not have too many boogeymen for me. You have just the right number.

Sidda can't help herself. She just loves books. Loves the way they feel, the way they smell, loves the black letters marching across the white pages...

At the beauty of what she had stumbled onto, at the fear that something terrible would happen because she was not vigilant enough. She cried at the fear of something so good that she would not be brave enough to bear it.

Friends are supposed to act like harbor boats—let you know if you’re off course. But it ain’t always possible…

You know how some people, when they're together, they somehow make you feel more hopeful? Make you feel like the world is not the insane place it really is?

When the Deep Purple falls,Over sleepy garden walls, And the stars begin to flicker in the sky,Thru the mist of a memoryYou wander back to me,Breathing my name with a sigh.In the still of the night,Once again I hold you tight, Tho' you're gone, your love lives onWhen moonlight beams.And as long as my heart will beatLover, we'll always meetHere in my Deep Purple dreams.

See, she goes places when she reads. I know all about that. When I'm reading, wherever I am, I'm always somewhere else.

I live in an ocean of smell…

The very air they breathed was almost a juice.

…the love we most cherish will, of necessity, bring us pain. Because that love is like the setting of a body with broken bones. But I want to stage the setting. I want to direct all scenes.

These are all I have. I do not have the wide, bright beacon of some solid old lighthouse, guiding ships safely home, past the jaggedrocks. I only have these little glimmers that flicker and then go out.

But who has time to write memoirs? I’m still living my memoirs.

Good Lord didn't mean for us to hate ourself. He made us to love ourself like He do, with wide open arms.

As Sidda joined Vivi in staring out into the darkness of the fields, where hundreds of sunflowers grew, she thought: I will never fully know my mother, any more than I will ever know my father or Connor, or myself. I have been missing the point. The point is not knowing another person, or learning to love another person. The point is simply this: how tender can we bear to be? What good manners can we show as we welcome ourselves and others into our hearts?

Sometimes lost treasures can be reclaimed.

There is the truth of history, and there is the truth of what a person remembers.

...Don't ever worry bout bein holy, babychild. Just keep your eyes wide open except when you sleep. Then let the Lord's mighty vision see you through the night.

What does my smile look like now? Vivi wondered. Can you reclaim that free-girl smile, or is it like virginity- once you loose it, that's it?

She used to say she could taste sleep and that it was as delicious as a BLT on fresh French bread.

How many years went by unnoticed, unembraced?

Sometimes I wonder if any of us are cut out for the lives we lead.

Because I miss them. Because I need them. Because I love them.

She saw night lights in the rooms of the babies who dreamed soft seersucker dreams, drugged happy with the heat, their pink baby bodies curled against worn out cotton, not fearing Hitler yet, their strong, tiny hearts beating in unison with the trees and the creeks and the bayou