“Accidents happen. Our bones shatter, our skin splits, our hearts break. We burn, we drown, we stay alive.”

“I think that we all drown, in one way or another.”

“We bite back the things we can't say and we cushion every surface for the inevitable moment when they all come fighting out.”

“There's this magical place,' he says with mock solemnity, 'called a library--I don't know if you've heard of it, but they have books, and also newspaper, and back issues of newspapers...”

“In the ghost house in the last days of the accident season, we were never going to die.”

“The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn't li...”

“I wonder if fears ever really go away, or if they just lose their power over us.”

“Fear is all in the mind”

“With a secret like that, at some point the secret itself becomes irrelevant. The fact that you kept it does not.”

“Then Cassie told her story. The feeling was like gathering up everything she's ever done or felt or known up to that moment and tying it into a ball and pitching it with all her might as far away a...”

“Every woman needs secrets,' her mother said with a smile then, her eyes meeting Sally's in the rearview mirror. 'Remember that when you're old like me, pumpkin, because the world has a way of makin...”