“But I'll tell you something else, too. Something I've learned, the hard way. I guess"—Gram laughed a little—"I'm the kind of person who has to learn things the hard way. You've got to hold on. Hold on to people. They can get away from you. It's not always going to be fun, but if you don't—hold on—then you lose them.”

“I've learned a lot this year.. I learned that things don't always turn our the way you planned, or the way you think they should. And I've learned that there are things that go wrong that don't always get fixed or get put back together the way they were before. I've learned that some broken things stay broken, and I've learned that you can get through bad times and keep looking for better ones, as long as you have people who love you.”

“You people always hold onto old identities, old faces and masks, long after they've served their purpose. But you've got to learn to throw things away eventually.”

“You don't understand, you fool' says Yegor, looking dreamily up at the sky. 'You've never understood what kind of person I am, nor will you in a million years... You just think I'm a mad person who has thrown his life away... Once the free spirit has taken hold of a man, there's no way of getting it out of him.”

“There ain't no way you can hold onto something that wants to go, you understand? You can only love what you got while you got it.”

“Nothing lasts," she says, and there's a little crack in her voice. "You think it's going to. You think, 'Here's something I can hold on to,' but it always slips away.”