I hated motorcycles. I said to my mother, 'I'll never get a motorcycle.' And she said, 'You never know what you'll want when you are older.' After that, the thing that scared me was not so much the motorcycle itself, but that I could turn into a person who would want one. I was scared of the idea that I could become an entirely different person, a stranger to myself.

All the things she planned to feel, the way she planned to look and seem, the appropriate things she planned to say. None of them came to pass.

I'm dying with you before I'm living without you.

She went around with a broken heart, and she wasn't sure who'd broken it. She thought it was herself, mostly.

It was their mothers, long ago. Tibby noted with joy that all four of them were wearing jeans.

It’s natural to overlook and even sacrifice the things that belong to us most easily most gracefully. So here’s me asking you to please not make that mistake.

She got under the covers and put her arms around the bag. She could smell Tibby. It used to be she couldn't smell Tibby's smell in the way you couldn't smell your own; it was too familiar. But tonight she could. This was some living part of Tibby still here and she held on to it. There was more of Tibby with her here and now than in what she had seen in the cold basement room that day.