“Overnight business could go down enough to hurt; yet as a rule it slowly recovered--sometimes it seemed to take forever--went up, not high enough to be really up, only not down.”

“The guy looks young enough to be your kid, Grace. Yes, but only if I’d really slutted it up in junior high…”

“Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing--until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.”

“Sometimes people put up walls, not to keep others out, but to see who cares enough to break them down.”

“Sometimes you put walls up not to keep people out, but to see who cares enough to break them down.”

“All I know is that growing up hurts too much. Growing down is what I'd really like to do. Be little enough again so it would be perfectly natural to be protected from the wind and the rain—and the world.”