“Tucker, please put him down," said Annie. "You're frightening Jackson.""He's not," said Jackson. "It's cool. I don't like that guy anyway. Punch him, Dad.”

“One thing about great art: it made you love people more, forgive them their petty transgressions. It worked in the way that religion was supposed to, if you thought about it.”

“Experience, then, was something that enabled you to do nothing with a clear conscience. Experience was an overrated quality.”

“She regretted the explanation immediately, but that was because she always regretted everything”

“Everyone disliked their partners at some time or another, she knew that. But shed spent her hours in the dark wondering whether shed ever liked him. Would it really have been so much worse to spend...”

“Of course Tucker Crowe was in pain when he made [the record], but he couldn't just march into a recording studio and start howling. He'd have sounded mad and pathetic. He had to calm the rage, tame...”

“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...”