To abandon a child, she had once said to someone, when she thought Cassandra couldn't hear, was an act so cold, so careless, it refused forgiveness.

They were young; time hadn't yet rubbed at them, polishing their differences and sharpening their opinions...

...home is a magnet that lures back even its most abstracted children. But whether tomorrow or years from now, I cannot guess.

She either confused me with a much older child or else she glimpsed deep inside my soul and perceived a hole that needed filling. I've always chosen to believe the latter. After all, it's the librarian's one sworn purpose to bring books together with their one true reader.

Children don’t require of their parents a past and they find something faintly unbelievable, almost embarrassing, in parental claims to a prior existence.

I've heard it said that children born to stressful times never shake the air of woe . . . .

... for home is a magnet that lures back even its most abstracted children.