“I always kinda liked our attic ghost. When I was a kid, I used to go up there and read stories to it. Show it my new toys. It's just an old spirit stuck between the worlds, right? What's to be scared of?""~Vic”

“It's like the day you realize dolls are dolls. I pick up my old self and I see it's silly. A toy I've played with too often. It's a little sad, like an old golliwog at the bottom of the cupboard. Innocent and used-up and proud and silly.”

“I know it's trash: just another story made up to scare wicked females and correct unruly children. But it's all I have. I know I need something else. Something better. Like a story that shows how brazen women can take a good man down. I can hum to that.”

“Miss Millick wondered just what had happened to Mr. Wran. He kept making the strangest remarks when she took dictation. Just this morning he had quickly turned around and asked, "Have you ever seen a ghost, Miss Millick?" And she had tittered nervously and replied, "When I was a girl there was a thing in white that used to come out of the closet in the attic bedroom when you slept there, and moan. Of course it was just my imagination. I was frightened of lots of things." And he had said, "I don't mean that traditional kind of ghost. I mean a ghost from the world today, with the soot of the factories in its face and the pounding of machinery in its soul. The kind that would haunt coal yards and slip around at night through deserted office buildings like this one. A real ghost. Not something out of books." And she hadn't known what to say. ("Smoke Ghost")”

“Did you know that when we were kids Cass used to tell me your stories? She used to laugh at you. Not in a mean way, but in the way that Cass used to laugh at everything before...." He gestures around us at our world now. I shake my head. "I thought Cass never liked my stories. Never remembered them." "Oh yes, I would beg her to tell me if she had new stories from you." "Why didn't you ask me yourself?" I whisper. "Because you were Harry's," he responds. "Not always." "Yes, always," he says. "Always in his eyes," he adds in a softer tone.”

“I'm not saying it's what I would have wanted. But don't you see? We fuck up our lives again and again and it's always our children who pick up the bill. We move on to new relationships, always starting over, always thinking we've got another chance to get it right, it's the kids from all these broken marriages who pay the price. They - my son, your daughters, all the millions like them - are carrying around wounds that are going to last a lifetime. It has to stop.”