“I believed we could know what was happening to us. We were not excluded from our own lives. That is not my head on someone else's body in the photograph that's introduced as evidence. I didn't believe that nations play-act on a grand scale. I lived in the real.”

“Like you and me," said Jade. "How we used to be.""What do you mean? Crazy?""Living on our own world. Believing what we felt was separate from everything else. We couldn't do anything except be together and nothing else was real.""That's right.""Well, that's crazy. And you just said it was, even you.""No, " I said, "not when we both believe it. Crazy people are alone and no one understands what they mean. But that's not our way. We both know and it makes complete sense. It's not when you make it true by living it. And other people believe it, too, remember. Believe it about us. Everyone who knows us, sees us together. We have that effect.”

“I believe these stories exist because we sometimes need to create unreal monsters and bogies to stand in for all the things we fear in our real lives: the parent who punches instead of kissing, the auto accident that takes a loved one, the cancer we one day discover living in our own bodies. If such terrible occurrences were acts of darkness, they might actually be easier to cope with. But instead of being dark, they have their own terrible brilliance. . . and none shine so bright as the acts of cruelty we sometimes perpetrate in our own families.”

“Our lives are the only meaningful expression of what we believe and in Whom we believe. And the only real wealth, for any of us, lies in our faith.”

“For is it not the common experience of all of us - you and I - that we do no incorporate the truth of these propositions in our lives? We say we know, but we do not do as we know. We say we believe, but we do not act like it.”

“Things happen, I thought, and we respond. That's what it all comes down to. To believe anything else, as far as I could tell, was simply an illusion.”