Healing wasn’t always the best thing. Sometimes a hole was better left open. Sometimes it healed too thick and too well and left separate pieces fused and incompetent. And it was harder to reopen after that.

She had willed her heart to stay small and contained, but it wouldn’t be. Oh, well.

As the three of them walked home from the trees, nobody needed to say it, but Ama knew. They had questioned their friendship. They had searched and wondered, looking for a sign. And all along they'd had their trees. You couldn't wear them. You couldn't pass them around. They offered no fashion advantage. But they had roots. They lived.

The most haunting thing was not that he didn't love her anymore. She could have accepted that eventually. The most haunting thing was that he did. He loved her from afar. He loved her in a way that was preserved in time, that couldn't be sullied. And she tended it in her careful, curatorial way.

When she is happy, she can't stop talking, when she is sad she doesn't say a word.

Marnie loved her better and more honestly than anyone else in the world, with the possible exception of her mother, who loved her intensely if not honestly.

Sometimes you need to make a mess. -Loretta, the Rollinses' hosekeeper