If she possessed any memory whatsoever of the days when she'd been whole, her shattered recollections were scattered across the darkscape of her mind in fragments so minuscule that she could no more easily piece them together than she could gather from the beach all the tiny chips of broken seashells, worn to polished flakes by ages of relentless tides, and reassemble them into their original architectures.

Little mouse, you were so quick, so bright, so sweet, so full of life. And you still are everything you were then. None of it’s lost forever. All that promise, all that hope, that love and goodness—it’s still inside you. No one can take the gifts God gave you. Only you.

A plot without action is like pasta without garlic, like Dolly Parton without cleavage, and like a writer without his similes.

He once told me that an August evening was "as hot as three toads in a Cuisinart," a comparison that left me blinking two days later.

The whisper of the dusk is night shedding its husk.

...in an infinite universe, anything that could be imagined might somewhere exist.

She'd been acutely aware that terror, betrayal, and cruelty had a human face, but she had not sufficiently appreciated that courage, kindness, and love had a human face as well.