“They came to sit & dangle their feet off the edge of the world & after awhile they forgot everything but the good & true things they would do someday. ”

“Africa.That bird came from Africa.But you mustn't cry for that bird, Paulie, because after a while it forgot about how the veldt smelled at noonday, and the sounds of the wildebeests at the waterhole, and the high acidic smell of the ieka-ieka trees in the great clearing north of the Big road. After awhile it forgot the cerise color of the sun dying behind Kilimanjaro. After awhile it only knew the muddy, smogged-out sunsets of Boston, that was all it remembered and all it wanted to remember. After awhile it didn't want to go back anymore, and if someone took it back and set it free it would only crouch in one place, afraid and hurting and homesick in two unknown and terribly ineluctable directions until something came along and killed it.'Oh Africa, oh, shit,' he said in a trembling voice.”

“You wanted to live inside the lines where the ordinariness of everything would protect you from the dragons that lay at the edge of the map ready to blow fire in your face if you strayed off course, to the edge of the known world.”

“Cabby was saying“someday”… someday Tony would love him. He hoped it mightbe true. Perhaps Cabby knew things that he didn’t”

“Because they forgot and I remembered. They would be lost soon enough, and I would keep going. The best I could do was hold on to them after they forgot themselves.”

“It would be a hard life, but it would be theirs alone. Here at the world's edge, far from everything familiar and safe, they would build a new home in the wilderness and do it as partners.”