“Was your old man in the war?""He was in the air force. He built runways.""The fucking air farce. He ever tell you about it? Did he live?""Yes, he lived. He spoke once about Vietnam.""If he only spoke about it once, he wasn’t lying.”

“He stole my breathe away the moment we first spoke. He's my air." -Sadie White”

“He lives for you, Laurel, and that's not some kind of figure of speech.He lives every day for you.Even after you moved to Crescent City,all he did every day was talk about you,worry about you, wonder what was happening, if he would ever see you again. And even what I told him I was sick of hearing about you, I could tell he was still thinking about you.Every moment of every day.”

“He said they would be mad at me. He said they would hate me.’Tina saw her hand on the poker again. Some killing was good.‘Lockie, look at me.’He turned away from the yellow fields and his eyes met hers.‘I’ve told you before and you have to believe me: everything the uniform said was a lie. Everything. He lied about taking you to your parents and he lied about them not looking for you and he lied about them being angry with you. Whatever he did or you did he made you do it. He made you do it and he was bad and a liar and you are a good kid.’‘He said they wouldn’t love me ever again.’Tina looked out of the window. The thing about being a kid was that you had to hear the good stuff a lot before you believed it. You only had to hear the bad shit once before it began to eat away at you.”

“He was learning to live on several planes at once. The art of it was to forget everything except the ground you stood on and the face you spoke from at that moment.”

“A wise old owl sat on an oak; The more he saw the less he spoke; The less he spoke the more he heard; Why aren't we like that wise old bird?”