“The world was an awful place, too awful to live in, if people could kill a President so easily.”

“He had lived as a handful of taffy between his mother and his father all his life, had been pulled in so many directions, stretched here and there, that all he could do was plaster a mighty smile on his face.”

“Americans look for heroes in the strangest of places.”

“looking off at the past as though it were a place one might still get to”

“caught up in the exciting world of adults and their antics”

“This is what keeps ghosts locked to the earth, that sweet burning need for something they loved and gave up too soon.”

“Sometimes, in the dark of night, when no one else could hear him but me, he'd cry out, like he was fighting some silent little war in his head.”