“Everything in the world had happened to them and kept on happening. They didn't care. They liked it that way.”

“She looked as though everything that she didn't like had happened to her.”

“Her heart had been through the shredder too many times to count, and she still had a small bit of hope left in her. She didn't like to admit. She certainly didn't like to think about it. But Jack had been her everything. Even after all the terrible things that had happened between them, she still couldn't look past the tiny piece of hope she'd kept locked away.”

“For all of them told happenings like narrations, chronological and careful, as if the ear of the world listened and wished to know surely.”

“There was no end to the things that happened to sheep unless they had a shepherd who cared more about them than anything else in the world.”

“Phil was mumbling that Reuben might become a writer after all and writers had a way of "redeeming everything that ever happens to them.”