“Life would be perfect if monster would stop farting.”

“Life would be better if the Leafs would make the playoffs. Life would be perfect if they’d win the Stanley Cup.”

“I would that I could have stopped time and preserved that day forever. It was a perfect day. There was the shadow of sorrow, yes. It would always be there. But that was the nature of life. The bright mirror and the dark, reflecting one another. And today there was so much brightness.”

“I think I would know Nora's fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women.”

“She knew her nature. She would recognize it if she came face-to-face with it. It would be a blue-eyed green-eyed monster, wolflike and snarling. A vicious beast that struck out at friends in uncontrollable anger, a killer that offered itself as a vessel of the king's fury.But then it was a strange monster, for beneath its exterior it was frightened and sickened by its own violence. It chastised itself for its savagery. And sometimes it had no heart for violence and rebelled against it utterly. A monster that refused, sometimes, to behave like a monster. When a monster stopped behaving like a monster , did it stop being a monster? Did it become something else?Perhaps she wouldn't recognize her own nature after all.”

“Added to their loveliness was a new mysterious suffering, perfectly silent, visible in the blue puffiness beneath their eyes or the way they would sometimes stop in mid-stride, look down, and shake their heads as though disagreeing with life.”