What if we had a chance to do it again and again, until we finally did get it right? Wouldn't that be wonderful?

If they would all sleep all the time she wouldn't mind being their mother.

Patricia embraces me on the station platform. 'The past is what you leave behind in life, Ruby,' she says with the smile of a reincarnated lama. 'Nonsense, Patricia,' I tell her as I climb on board my train. 'The past's what you take with you.

Life wasn't about becoming, was it? It was about being.

I did feel when my mother died if anyone was going to haunt me it would be her. And she hasn't, so I think it is possibly the end.

When you chopped logs with the ax and they split open they smelled beautiful, like Christmas. But when you split someone's head open it smelled like abattoir and quite overpowered the scent of the wild lilacs you'd cut and brought into the house only this morning, which was already another life.

Oh, God. What was happening to her, she was turning into a normal person.