“What fun it all was, she thought, and how entirely new and delicious being taken care of as though she were a thing that mattered, a precious thing!”

“She couldn't avoid being serious about things she cared for, and happiness made her grave at the thought of all the things which might destroy it.”

“Fuck. This was bad. It had happened, hadn't it? The thing she thought would never happen, the thing she was always so careful not to have happen. She'd lost count, she'd lost track of what exactly she'd taken, and it had happened.”

“Even though I had a history with that house, it didn't matter. You can't go back to how things were. How you thought they were. All you really have...is now.”

“The people they had been last summer, the person she had been--Dicey guessed she'd never be afraid again, not the way she had been all summer. She had taken care of them all, sometimes well, sometimes badly. And they had covered the distances. For most of the summer, they had been unattached. Nobody knew who they were or what they were doing. It didn't matter what they did, as long as they all stayed together. Dicey remembered that feeling, of having things pretty much her own way. And she remembered the feelings of danger. It was a little bit like being a wild animal, she thought to herself. Dicey missed that wildness. She knew she would never have it again. And she missed the sense of Dicey Tillerman against the whole world and doing all right.”

“But in the night he woke and held her tight as though she were all of life and it was being taken from him. He held her feeling she was all of life there was and it was true.”