“I've just fallen on some bad luck and landed jelly side down.”

“But luck is just throwing dice.”

“But I've swallowed my pride before, that's for sure. I'm practically lined with my mistakes on the inside like a bad-wallpapered bathroom.”

“Mr. Shepherd, ye cannot stop a bad thought from coming into your head. But ye need not pull up a chair and bide it sit down." - Mrs. Brown”

“Carlo is safe because I don't really love him that much. If he stopped wanting me around one day, it wouldn't be so terrible. I wouldn't die.Hallie, I realize how that sounds. I feel small and ridiculous and hemmed in on every side by the need to be safe. All I want is to be like you, to walk into a country of chickens and land mines and call that home, and have it be home. How do you just charge ahead, always doing the right thing, even if you have to do it alone with people staring?”

“But nothing on this earth is guaranteed, when you get right down to it, you know? I've been thinking about that. About how your kids aren't really YOURS, they're just these people that you try to keep an eye on, and hope you'll all grow up someday to like each other and still be in one piece. What I mean is, everything you get is really just on loan. Does that make sense?""Sure," I said. "Like library books. Sooner or later they've all got to go back into the nightdrop.”

“A human being can be good or bad or right or wrong, maybe. But how can you say a person is illegal? You just can't. That's all there is to it.”