Andrea Lochen said this quote

It was a lesson she was still learning. When she had first started nursing, she had taken every death personally, like she was losing her father all over again. Every patient lost under her care was a little piece of death she would carry around with her until the end of her own life. But the alternative seemed so unfeeling. Tina and the other nurses could crack jokes and banter back and forth about contestants on American Idol before the body of a deceased patient was even cold. It was a coping mechanism, she knew, but not necessarily one she thought she would ever adopt. There had to be something in between. Olive had been called a bleeding heart before, but her heart no longer had the same plasticity and tenderness—it was scarred and worn beyond repair

~ Andrea Lochen

What made Olive the saddest about the Gardners was that everyone wanted to be enshrined in someone’s memory. It was the only way of living on after death, really: in the minds of loved ones. Memories were the only things that made aging bearable, a way of reverting to better, simpler days.

~ Andrea Lochen

What good were fate and fortune anyway? If there was some sort of plan she was supposed to follow, it was unreadable to her and impossible to stick to. She was tired of fate, which was probably just a made-up concept invented by humans to feel like something or someone was guiding them anyway. God, spirits, cookies, whatever. She was so sick of buying into the idea that there was actually meaning behind any of this. It was just her, blind and alone, making a mess of her life on her own, thank you very much.

~ Andrea Lochen

Love had still seemed like such a paltry thing in the face of all my doubts then, much the way it felt now. David had worries my love couldn’t touch, fears my love couldn’t easily dispel. My love seemed like a well-worn blanket instead of the titanium shield I needed.

~ Andrea Lochen