“Dittany hadn't lived in Lobelia Falls all her life without coming to realize that walls do in fact have ears and every little bird is a stool pigeon at heart.”

“I never heard such drivel in my life," said Evangeline Fairfield.It was the most injudicious remark she'd ever made. Arethusa turned on her like a wounded tigress.Madam, I write such drivel!”

“The house looked a tiny bit unfamiliar, as houses always do when their owners have ben away.”

“I'm making a statement about conformity."For or against?"That's for the viewer to decide. I'm an artist, not a preacher."Agnes Phiffer & Osbert Monk in The Grub-and-Stakers Spin a Yarn”

“Did he really want to know? That at any given moment I see everyday life as only _this big_, the space between my finger and thumb. The rest of my mind is occupied with five, a dozen, three dozen other potential lives, each representing some opportunity never taken or currently within reach. Without those worlds of possibility, my life immediately begins to seem boring and drab. I'm thirty-three years old, always broke, and merely _existing_ in what, without having been sealed by formal wedding vows, had become a traditional marriage. I had no blues to lament, not really. My only drama was in my daydreams. They reminded me that any day, at any moment, I could change everything, and while many of those alternate lives featured James at my side--the truth was that some of them did not.”

“Being an idealist is not being a simpleton; without idealists there would be no optimism and without optimism there would be no courage to achieve advances that so-called realists would have you believe could never come to fruition.”

“Honey, that man would do anything to keep you. Lie, steal, cheat, kill, clean up after himself, and do laundry.”