“Ah, gods, hope. Our savior and our tormentor, the price and ferry pass for the dreams that carry us to the future.”

“hope could betray you—but if you had no hope, life could actuallysurprise you in the best of ways.”

“Well, sometimes small dreams had grandeur, he thought with dignity. Sometimes, the small dreams were all a person needed to live.”

“I love you. I want to shout it sometimes. I know you worry about our letters and texts getting read--shades of WWII, haunting us still, I guess, and I'm well aware that nothing's safe on the internet. I worry too. You need to know that when I say it, when I ask you to say it, it's because my lungs feel full of dark water, and seeing it or writing it lets me breathe.”

“Sometimes the small dreams were all a person needed to live.”

“You wouldn’t shut up about how brain-damaged that ‘little Rusky diva-bitch’ was and how he needed to just ‘get over his sorry self and give our poor cop a blow job and live happily ever after’—you remember that?”

“How’re the cats?” he asked, smiling a little. He did miss Angel Marie. Hell, he missed them all.“Feral,” Benny sniffed. “And horny. Every time one of us walks in, they all start humping our shoes.”“They’re fixed,” Shane mumbled, but the conversation was oddly reassuring. It sounded normal, and like home.“Tell that to the big fuzzy brown one….”“Orlando Bloom?”“Yeah, whatever. Last time I was there that damned animal violated my knitting.”Shane lost a battle with a laugh and then whined because it hurt his ribs. “Violated?”[...]“Let’s just say that wool is no longer virgin,” she quipped dryly, and Shane’s chest shook.”