“If music can shine, Sophie thought, this music shone... 'It's like eight thousand birds, Charles!'When the music closed, she clapped until the rest of the audience had stopped and until her hands w...”

“Perhaps, she thought, thats what love does. Its not there to make you feel special. Its to make you brave. It was like a ration pack in the desert, she thought, like a box of matches in a dark wood...”

“It is difficult to believe extraordinary things.”

“You have been the great green adventure of my life. Without you my days would be unlit.”

“I do, Im afraid, understand books far more readily than I understand people. Books are so easy to get along with.”

“Only weak thinkers do not love the sky.”

“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...”