"The world was tilted now and Wayne’s absence in our lives had become the drain toward which everything ran."
This quote, which Cassandra says about her long-lost brother, reflects how she and her family's lives are changed when her brother Wayne disappears. For the Williams family, their lives changed in profoundly negative ways. Cassandra's father leaves them and starts a new family; her mother becomes consumed with grief and starts a foundation dedicated to finding missing children. The world, as the quote says, was taken off its axis for the family.
"Grief doesn’t choose its timing well; you’ll never know when it will grip your neck."
This quote is one of the most important quotes in the entire novel. At its core, it is a commentary on grief: it doesn't follow a pattern and grips a person strongly (by their neck) at seemingly random times. And when it does grip a person, it renders them unable to fully function. In other words, it cripples them and consumes them with its sheer power. Throughout the novel, grief grips each of the members of the Williams family in different ways. Most prominently, Cassandra sees her brother's face everywhere in her life. She—and her mother and father—are often consumed with their grief over losing Wayne.
"I don’t want to tell you what happened. I want to tell you how it felt."
This quote is one of the richest and most important pieces of characterization for Cassandra in all of The Furrows. Like the rest of her family, Cassandra has told the story of her brother's disappearance so many times that she never wants to tell the story again. Instead, because not many people asked her how his disappearance made her feel, she wants to talk about her emotions and how her disappearance made her feel.
