“I crumple on my bed. For a second, i believed that what i wanted more than anything in the world had come true. For a second, i believed that my dad was back. but he isn't. He's gone again. he's really truly gone and i know it. i know i'll never see him again no matter how much i want to. The candle in me has blown out and i'm afraid, really, really afraid, because my biggest fear is true. i have to live my life without my dad, my running partner, the guy who taught me amnesty and sang john lennon songs really off key.”

“Melanie is the gentlest of dreams and a part of my dreaming. And if the war had not come I would have lived out my life, happily buried at Twelve Oaks, contentedly watching life go by and never being a part of it. But when the war came, life as it really is thrust itself against me. The first time I went into action—it was at Bull Run, you remember—I saw my boyhood friends blown to bits and heard dying horses scream and learned the sickeningly horrible feeling of seeing men crumple up and spit blood when I shot them. But those weren't the worst things about the war, Scarlett. The worst thing about the war was the people I had to live with.I had sheltered myself from people all my life, I had carefully selected my few friends. But the war taught me I had created a world of my own with dream people in it. It taught me what people really are, but it didn't teach me how to live with them. And I'm afraid I'll never learn. Now, I know that in order to support my wife and child, I will have to make my way among a world of people with whom I have nothing in common.”

“Cricket tells a joke and turns to see if I'm laughing, if I think he's funny, and I want him to know that I do think he's funny, and I want him to know that I'm glad he's my friend, and I want him to know that he has the biggest heart of anyone I've ever known. And I want to press my palm against his chest to feel it beat, to prove he's really here.”

“You see, what I really want, and what I'm getting with Stephen, is the opportunity to rebuild myself from scratch. David's picture of me is complete now, and I'm pretty sure neither of us likes it much; I want to rip the page out and start again on a fresh sheet, just like I used to do when I was a kid and had messed a drawing up. It doesn't even matter who the fresh sheet is, really, so its beside the point whether I like Stephen, or whether he knows what to do with me in bed, or anything like that. I just want his rapt attention when I tell him that my favorite book is Middlemarch, and i just want that feeling, the feeling I get with him, of having not gone wrong yet”

“You know something?" He lifted his head, and when he turned to me, he had this strange look in his eyes. Almost as if he was really seeing me for the first time. "I don't think I ever really lived until this. I've never done anything that mattered before, but now I'm fighting to save my life, and yours. And I know it sounds really cheesy and lame, but I don't think I ever really felt alive. Not until I met you.”

“I really wished he hadn't made me hate to read the Bible. Having it shoved down my throat all my life had made me bitter toward reading it. I believed it, but my dad had used it to his benefit too many times and ignored the parts in there that would point out his wrongs. Like judging Beau without even knowing him. That was in the Bible too.”