“This was fun. We should find out we're still married more often.""Why, so every day can be a special new plunge into hell?""Nobody I'd rather burn with than you, babe.”

“We should invest in kids like these," we're told, "because it will be more expensive not to." Why do our natural compassion and religious inclinations need to find a surrogate in dollar savings to be voiced or acted on? Why not give these kids the best we have because we are a wealthy nation and they are children and deserve to have some fun while they are still less than four feet high?”

“But if you have so much fun, then why don't you get together more than once a month?'She looked at me like a wise old owl and winked. 'Do something too often and it stops being special.”

“the people you love can surprise you every day... maybe who we are isn't so much about what we do, but rather what we're capable of when we least expect it.”

“I'd rather believe in reincarnation than hell. The idea of an afterlife is much so more tolerable when returning is an option.”

“So I thought I’d feel different afterward, after the visible neon sign proclaiming 'virgin' had blinked out on my forehead. I’d spent years obessessing about it, so it seemed like somthing should have changed. Maybe it would have if I’d still been at Ceder Falls High School surrounded by the gossip and the braggadocio of teenage boys. But on my uncle's farm, nobody noticed, or at least nobody said anything. The next day, like every day, we dug corn, chopped wood, and carried water. And it didn’t really change much between Darla and me, either. Yes, making love was fun, but it wasn’t really any more fun than anything we’d already been doing together. Just different.”