“Most places we leave in childhood grow less, not more, fancy.”

“Ambition robs you of your childhood. The moment you want to become an adult—in any way—something in your childhood dies.”

“...I suddenly realized what small towns are. They are places where you grow up with the peculiar-you live next to the strange and the unlikely for so long that everything and everyone become commonplace.”

“...but I suddenly realized what small towns are. They are places where you grow up with the peculiar -- you live next to the strange and the unlikely for so long that everything and everyone become commonplace. My cousins were both small-towners and outsiders; they had not grown up with Own Meany, who was so strange to them that he inspired awe - yet they were no more likely to fall upon him, or to devise ways to torture him, than it was likely for a herd of cattle to attack a cat.”

“In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us -- not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss.”

“You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.”

“Gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us.”