Sometimes, like now, Olive had a sense of just how desperately hard every person in the world was working to get what they needed. For most, it was a sense of safety, in the sea of terror that life increasingly became. (211)

I love theater. I love sitting in an audience and having the actors right there, playing out what it means to be a human being.

The appetites of the body were private battles.

If you get divorced in New York, you go into therapy and will talk to anybody you meet on the sidewalk about it.

It’s just that I’m the kind of person,' Rebecca continued, 'that thinks if you took a map of the whole world and put a pin in it for every person, there wouldn’t be a pin for me.

She remembered was hope was, and this was it. That inner churning that moves you forward, plows you through life the way the boats plowed the shiny water, the way the plane was plowing forward to a place new, and where she was needed.

Or maybe, he thought, returning to the boxes, it was part of being Catholic--you were made to feel guilty about everything