That's why there are ten gates to pass through before you reach the garden. If life were easy there would be one gate. There would be no gates at all.

There are some things, after all, that Sally Owens knows for certain: Always throw spilled salt over your left shoulder. Keep rosemary by your garden gate. Add pepper to your mashed potatoes. Plant roses and lavender, for luck. Fall in love whenever you can.

Perhaps it is possible to discover more in silence than in speech. Or perhaps it is only that those who are silent among us learn to listen.

The more you feel, the stronger you are.

My grandmother told me once that when you lose somebody you think you've lost the whole world as well, but that's not the way things turn out in the end. Eventually, you pick yourself up and look out the window, and once you do you see everything that was there before the world ended is out there still. There are the same apple trees and the same songbirds, and over our heads, the very same sky that shines like heaven, so far above us we can never hope to reach such heights.

It's not the lie that's the problem; it's the distance the lie forges between you.

I wasn't quite as certain that I knew her soul. When it came right down to it, I wasn't sure she knew me either.