"Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin."

"It's what you do that makes your soul."

"Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier."

"The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don't know."

"It is true that I do not speak as well as I can think. But that is true of most people, as nearly as I can tell."

"If we can't, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread."

"The truth needs so little rehearsal."

"It's frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known."

"Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws."

"Sugar, it's no parade but you'll get down the street one way or another, so you'd just as well throw your shoulders back and pick up the pace."

"But I've swallowed my pride before, that's for sure. I'm practically lined with my mistakes on the inside like a bad-wallpapered bathroom."

"Your dreams, what you hope for and all that, it's not separate from your life. It grows right up out of it."

"Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side."

"Humans can be fairly ridiculous animals."

"Memories do not always soften with time; some grow edges like knives."

"To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know."

"How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so you could dread losing them."

"No other continent has endured such an unspeakably bizarre combination of foreign thievery and foreign goodwill."

"Silence has many advantages. When you do not speak, other people presume you to be deaf or feeble-minded and promptly make a show of their own limitations."

"If you never stepped on anybody's toes, you never been for a walk."

"I lost a child," she said, meeting Lusa's eyes directly. "I thought I wouldn't live through it. But you do. You learn to love the place somebody leaves behind for you."

"Now I'm starting to think he wasn't supposed to be my whole life, he was just this doorway to me."

"A human being can be good or bad or right or wrong, maybe. But how can you say a person is illegal? You just can't. That's all there is to it."

"Morning always comes."

"Thanks for this day, for all birds safe in their nests, for whatever this is, for life."

"If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life."

"The death of something living is the price of our own survival, and we pay it again and again. We have no choice. It is the one solemn promise every life on earth is born and bound to keep."

"I'm of a fearsome mind to throw my arms around every living librarian who crosses my path, on behalf of the souls they never knew they saved."

"Last time I talked to her she didn't sound like herself. She's depressed. It's awful what happens when people run out of money. They start thinking they're no good."

"I've about decided that's the main thing that separates happy people from the other people: the feeling that you're a practical item, with a use, like a sweater or a socket wrench."

"Love weighs nothing."

"...I stir in bed and the memories rise out of me like a buzz of flies from a carcass. I crave to be rid of them..."

"Oh, mercy. If it catches you in the wrong frame of mind, the King James Bible can make you want to drink poison in no uncertain terms."

"Cooking"Cooking is 80"Cooking is 80 percent confidence, a skill best acquired starting from when the apron strings wrap around you twice." percent confidence, a skill best acquired starting from when the apron strings wrap around you twice." is 80 percent confidence, a skill best acquired starting from when the apron strings wrap around you twice."

"Sadness is more or less like a head cold - with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer."

"I had decided early on that if I couldn’t dress elegant, I’d dress memorable."

"If the Lord hasn't got a boyfriend lined up for me to marry, that's his business."

"When moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot-air balloon that's awfully hard not to poke."

"It's surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time."

"It's terrible to lose somebody, but it's also true that some people never have anybody to lose, and I think that's got to be so much worse."

"A choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. I am the forest's conscience, but remember, the forest eats itself and lives forever."

"It's the one thing we never quite get over: that we contain our own future."

"I thought: this is how life is, ridiculous beyond comprehension."

"Alice wonders if other women in the middle of the night have begun to resent their Formica."

"I thought I wouldn't live through it. But you do. You learn to love the place somebody leaves behind for you."

"...nothing momentous comes in this world unless it comes on the shoulders of kindness."

"The conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners"

"No matter what kind of night you're having, morning always wins."

"Hunger of the body is altogether different from the shallow, daily hunger of the belly. Those who have known this kind of hunger cannot entirely love, ever again, those who have not."

"Honk if you love Jesus, text while driving if you want to meet up."