“Children of the mentally ill learn early on how not to be a bother, especially if they grew up with neglect. As my sister insisted once, when she was in severe pain after injuring her ankle, 'This ...”

“Some of my old memories feel trapped in amber in my brain, lucid and burning, while others are like the wing beat of a hummingbird, an intangible, ephemeral blur.”

“We humans are different--our brains are built not to fix memories in stone but rather to transform them. Our recollections change in their retelling.”

“Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel says we are who we are because of what we learn and what we remember. Who am I, then, if my memory is impaired?”

“I don't want to be the person who gasps in fear whenever she hears the sound of a doorbell or a phone. I just want to lose myself in these hills, in the river winding west to the city of bridges.”

“We humans are different - our brains are built not to fix memories in stone but rather to transform them, our recollections in their retelling.”

“There are things that tend to moderate with age. Schizophrenia is somewhat like that.”

“Schizophrenia beats dining alone.”

“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...”