“They would be remembered for a moment then would be forgotten as if they had never walked the earth.”

“Regions remembered who had fought for whom, and they have not forgotten. Football grounds grew up out of the divided earth and have not forgotten either.”

“We had to survive to remember. Otherwise everything we were would disappear. Those people we loved would fade as though we'd never loved them, as if they'd never walked and talked and burned, forgetting them was the real evil. That was the hole of darkness.”

“And always America is the place of the deathless and enraptured moments, the eye that looked, the mouth that smiled and vanished, and the word; the stone, the leaf, the door we never found and never have forgotten. And these are the things that we remember of America, for we have known all her thousand lights and weathers, and we walk the streets, we walk the streets forever, we walk the streets of life alone.”

“It was her street, her neighborhood, her life. She knew that someday in the future it would not be hers anymore. But she would remember it, she would treasure it, she would miss it. She would hold it in her heart. She knew that someday she would look back at this very moment and miss it....Never had life seemed more beautiful and more sad.”

“She was held in the tension just before movement, about to walk back toward the house. Later she would think, If I had turned away, I'd have missed the moment he fell in love.He would not remember it that way. What he experienced was not so much the beginning of love as a cessation of pain.”