“If I had my way...We would lock ourselves away from that madness out there...”

“..numbed by disappointment and betrayal, like a child who had been awakened suddenly from a summer dream about christmas morning.”

“Thack seemed to sort something out for a moment. “Sometimes I watch him when he’s playing with Harry or digging in the yard. And I think: This is it, this is the guy I’ve waited for all my life. Then this other voice tells me not to get used to it, that it’ll only hurt more later. It’s funny. You’re feeling this enormous good fortune and waiting for it to be over at the same time.”“You seem happy,” Brian ventured.“I am.”“Well … that’s a lot. I envy you that.”Thack shrugged. “All we’ve got is now, I guess. But that’s all anybody gets. If we wasted that time being scared …”“Absolutely.”

“I felt very close to God.... My friends say that's because I was always on my knees.”

“Down the Peninsula at Cypress Lawn Cemetery, a woman in a paisley turban climbed out of a battered automobile and trudged up the hillside to a new grave.She stood there for a moment, humming to herself, then removed a joint from a tortoise-shell cigarette case and laid it gently on the grave."Have fun," she smiled. "It's Colombian.”

“Pete thinks we all have a blacking factory: some awful moment, early on, when we surrender our childish hearts as surely as we lose our baby teeth.”

“Her apartment seemed fussier than ever, as if the doilies and tassels had taken to breeding in their unguarded moments.”