“If we had paid attention, we would have understood there are some things in this world you cannot outrun.”

“Grandmamma had been the last connection to our past. I had understood her as some referent moral authority to whom we paid no heed, but by whose judgments we measured our waywardness.”

“My sounds [crying] were small and muffled but obvious. No one paid any attention. It was the way we had become. In a world full of sorrows, this was only one more.”

“Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies we are determined to forment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice, or representation.”

“But we have not understood the world; how its way is to destroy without destroying, the way air levels a mountain; things fly apart in a vacuum...It wears us to the hard thing we cannot help being;and if the only hard thing is our determinationnot to be hard, it wears us down to that.”

“Nothing is free. Everything has to be paid for. For every profit in one thing, payment in some other thing. For every life, a death. Even your music, of which we have heard so much, that had to be paid for. Your wife was the payment for your music. Hell is now satisfied.”