“He was inefficient in the old sense of the word; not incapable, but unwilling to be seduced by work--unwilling to be singleminded. Those things that needed to be done were constantly put off for those things that needed to be thought about. And unfinished projects did not pester him to be completed, but represented, in themselves, thoughts he had not finished thinking....”

“[He] accepted me for what I was and it wasn't fair of him not to give me the same chance to accept him in the same way.”

“Telling the truth is always wrong if it threatens those for whom being wrong can never be true.”

“We are not separate, and I want you to know that. We are all part of one thing, and nothing good has ever passed or ever can pass away. There is no way out, but there is a way in, and when one person feels lonely like a ghost it touches us all.”

“She had not known how to tell him that his loving whispers were always in her ears, like a story she’d been told, the story of a thing she did not deserve. But he understood. He called those thoughts “the baby teeth of a snake,” and swore he would rip them out of her, and pledged to prove to her that the opposite was true. And he didn’t even have to explain to her what he meant by “the opposite”; she knew it was the opposite of her.”

“Like one of those damned clapper lights. Love on. Love off.Robert musing about his parents love for him”

“But what slayed Robert was that for all these years, all his adult life, he'd never believed in relationships and commitment. They were highly overrated as far as he was concerned. Some people's entire lives revolved around love...finding it, keeping it. People had written poetry about it, had sacrificed for it, had even died for it. And he'd never been able to understand why. Why would anyone want to invest themselves in such a fickle emotion that sounded too good to be true because it was too good to be true. When the going got tough, even when someone claimed to love and be committed to the people in their lives, they really only honored that commitment when things were good.”