“Where you'd be wearing out the knees of your trousers, sir, they just have to go ahead and wear out their knees!”

“Children can be your heartache. But that doesn't matter, you have to go on and have them . . . it works out.”

“...prodigal summer, the season of extravagant procreation. It could wear out everything in its path with its passionate excesses, but nothing alive with wings or a heart or a seed curled into itself in the ground could resist welcoming it back when it came.”

“The thing is, it's my own fault. I just can't put up with a person that won't go out of his way for me. And that's what a man is. Somebody that won't go out of his way for you. I bet it says that in the dictionary.”

“We would not wake up from this nightmare to find out it was someone's real life, and for once that someone wasn't just a poor unlucky nobody in a shack you could forget about. It was our life, the only one we were going to have.”

“She would just be catching up when I'd go again, swimming farther out into life because I still hadn't found a rock to stand on.”

“Sugar, it's no parade but you'll get down the street one way or another, so you'd just as well throw your shoulders back and pick up the pace.”