Quotes from Maile Meloy

One aspect of human resilience, in all its marvelousness, was the ability to recalibrate, to adjust to new circumstances with astonishing speed.

What has mattered, always, is that they're together, and everything else falls away.

Chet suddenly wished she had quit teaching the class because of him, that he'd had any effect on her at all.

But the commandments were absolute. The stone tablets Moses brought down from the mountain had not said Thou shalt not kill except when fighting Nazis, or in self-defense, or in some other situations, listed below. Thou shalt not steal unless thou art near death with hunger fighting in a just cause, or hath a family to support, or if perhaps an irresistible opportunity to get rich presenteth itself.

Yvette had never talked about her marriage - she was a smart girl, and she knew you had no right to complain about someone you got all the way to the altar with. You made that choice, even if you were a child when you did it, and the marriage vow was sacred.

Maybe we made her feel safe,' Aaron said. 'So she can be brave.

There's a look little girls have who are adored by their fathers," Bea said. "It's that facial expression of being totally impervious to the badness of the world. If they can keep that look into their twenties, they're pretty much okay, they've got a force field around them. I don't know if Jonna ever had it. I think she's always known about the bad things.

Civilization, her mother had told her since she was small, was a series of agreements about what was good for everyone, enforced by law. And civilization was only a thin veneer over the savagery and greed that were the human default.

One aspect of human resilience, in all its marvelousness, was the ability to recalibrate, to adjust to new circumstances

working the salt-roughened lines. They had

People regressed, around their families, to the age at which they had been angriest.