Kim Edwards

You're right, Norah, anything can happen, anytime. But what goes wrong isn't your fault. You can't spend the rest of your life tiptoeing around to try and avert disaster. It won't work. You'll just end up missing the life you have.

Each letter has a shape, she told them, one shape in the world and no other, and it is your responsibility to make it perfect.

The world beyond the water was a blue of green and stone and blue. A moment later Yoshi pushed through, the water pouring down in sheets so smooth it looked like glass, and stepped into the calm [p. 296]

Think of it, Dad. What if I have it in me to do that, and I don't try?

Then she had been a fiancee, a young wife, and a mother, and she had discovered that these words were far too small ever to contain the experience.

He could hardly imagine anymore what his life would be without the weight of his hidden knowledge. He'd come to think of it as a kind of penance. It was self-destructive, he could see that, but that was the way things were. People smoked, they jumped out of airplanes, they drank too much and got into their cars and drove without seat belts.

Photography is all about secrets. The secrets we all have and will never tell.

She had died at age twelve, and by now she was nothing but the memory of love-- nothing, now, but bones.

Norah watched him, serious and utterly absorbed in his task, overcome by the simple fact of his existence.

In some deep place in her heart, Caroline had kept alive the silly romantic notion that somehow David Henry had once known her as no one else ever could. But it was not true. He had never even glimpsed her.

He'd kept this silence because his own secrets were darker, more hidden, and because he believed that his secrets had created hers.

It seemed there was no end at all to the lies a person could tell, once she got started.