“When I walk, I walk with you. Where I go, you're with me always.”

“She allowed me to understand I'd done everything I could for her, and that I, and everyone who loved her, had to step away and go on living.Now I know what she wanted from me on the day she told me...”

“Love was never a mistake,even when it wasn't returned.”

“I'm trying to find someone who doesn't want to be found.""That can be as hard as looking for a shadow.”

“He was withdrawing. I think it was getting harder for him to accept his fate. Like a bird in a cage, he grew silent.”

“James had a theory about caged birds, one he hoped to prove when he became a scientist someday. He believed that all birds that had their freedom taken from them eventually lost their voices. Once ...”

“My mother... she is beautiful, softened at the edges and tempered with a spine of steel. I want to grow old and be like her.”

“As mothers and daughters, we are connected with one another. My mother is the bones of my spine, keeping me straight and true. She is my blood, making sure it runs rich and strong. She is the beati...”

“It's not always easy being her daughter.' I think,' she said, 'sometimes it's hard no matter whose daughter you are.”

“She was of the stuff of which great men's mothers are made. She was indispensable to high generation, feared at tea-parties, hated in shops, and loved at crises.”

“For we think back through our mothers if we are women.”

“He is a young man with a future of power and opportunity and we are young women destined to be either wives and mothers at the very best, or spinster parasites at the worst.”

“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...”