"It's one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else."
When Codi spends her Christmas with Loyd in his village, Codi notes how many of the houses seem to be in a bad shape and close to collapsing. Loyd tells her that his people believe that man should not consume more than he needs and thus the house he builds should collapse when he dies in order to make room for other people to build. Everything should be in harmony with nature, buildings included, and the structures built by man should accommodate nature not the other way around. Codi interprets his statement as supporting her belief that she should not stay in one place for too long but Loyd points out that the way the natives live is not to move from one place to another constantly but rather live on what they can find in the land they already are.
"the very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope."
Through her letters, Hallie tries to give advice to her sister who seems to be unsure what her purpose in life is. In fact, the novel follows Codi as she tries to find a purpose in her life and it documents her efforts in trying to live without her sister by her side. In comparison with Hallie, who knows what she wants from life and follows her dreams, Codi is unsure what she hopes to achieve in her life and thus she seems to always be lost. Codi is unable to understand her sister and how she manages to have a purpose in life and this is bets seen when Codi is unable to understand what Hallie wanted to say to her in her letters.
By the time they were back in Grace on the last evening bus, I was later informed, the Stitch and Bitch Club had already laid plans to come back in ten days with five hundred peacock piñatas. There would only be two deviations from the original plan. First, each piñata would be accompanied by a written history of Grace and its heroic struggle against the Black Mountain Mining Company. To my shock I was elected, in absentia, to write this epic broadside and get it mimeographed at the school
Codi always imagined herself as being an outsider, someone the community from Grace could never accept as being one of their own. Because of this, when Codi was elected to write a short paragraph that would accompany the piñatas the women from Grace made, she was shocked. It is then when Codi realized that while she considered herself as being an outsider, for those around her that was not the case and she was considered as being a valuable member of the community.
