“It is easy to forget now, how effervescent and free we all felt that summer.”

“He was just like summer, and she loved summer. If she had any wish, it would be to live a lifetime of summers.”

“No- it was the best. Kind of joint where everyone checked their worries at the door. The beer was cold, the jokes came easy, we could smell the ocean, and everyone was always happy to be there.”

“It is often advantageous to forget. Forget your wincing humiliations, forget life's blows, and get on. For blocks in every direction, down every street in the city, people not yet old enough to have lines on their foreheads were laughing away memory, warmly ensconced in shrines of forgetfulness. Those who followed the word of God and those who preferred what the priests called "hoodoo" alike. People everywhere forgetting with drink or forgetting with religion or forgetting with the numbing quality of their many heaps of things. They looked forward and imagined rosy tomorrows, and gave up whatever horrors heckled their dreams, and listened to the pretty stories of whomever ruled their pulpit.”

“Diana felt she was beginning to understand why, in all those novels she read, the headiest loves were the loves that couldn't be.”

“Among her other talents were forgetting what she did not like and ignoring what she preferred not to see.”

“She saw now that he was like an illusionist who captivated women with a little sleight of hand and once she had seen the mechanism it had lost all power for her.”