“Poetry is language playing with itself.”

“I regret to say I'munable to reply to your unexpressed desires.”

“Happy marriages begin when we marry the ones we love and they blossom when we love the ones we marry. ”

“It is through fiction that we learn not to believe everything we read in print.”

“Another time he felt himself reenacting a conversation with father, a long talk about duty and honor and all the reasons why enlisting was the right thing to do. It was a talk they'd had several months ago, and Frank had agreed with everything his father had said, only this time Frank found himself taking a contrary opinion. What the hell's so honorable about it? Duty to whom? To myself, or the guys who would be fighting without me, or to the people here at home afraid of the Hun? Or duty to President Wilson, or to Carnegie, or to God, or to all the fallen soldiers before me, to Great-grandad Emmett and his bleached bones down at Antietam?”

“The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author. Past events are described in a fictitious manner, future events are described as they will indeed occur, unless they are disrupted by historical agitators, which is beyond the author's control. For now.”

“Maybe you could drive yourself crazy trying to chart backward all the causes and effects, all the ends and means, tracing everything to some original sin that may or may not have actually occurred but that people accepted as true, or true enough. Maybe staring into the eyes of all that history was a dangerous thing to do, as her mother had calmly warned her. Maybe you were supposed to move forward armed with just enough history to help you figure out the present without obsessing over the past. But how much was enough? Where was the gray area between ignorance and obsession?”