“I'm sure I must have sounded like a fool and a borderline psychotic most of that year, when I talked to people who thought they knew who and where they were at the time ... but looking back, I see that if I wasn't Right, at least I wasn't Wrong, and in that context I was forced to learn from my confusion ... which took awhile, and there's still no proof that what I finally learned was Right, but there's not a hell of a lot of evidence to show that I'm Wrong either.”

“Going your own way shouldn't stop them from being happy with you.""My brother and my sisters, they're clerks and parents and settled sort of people. I'm a puzzle, and sooner or later when you can't solve a puzzle, you have to think there's somthing wrong with it. Else there's something wrong with you.""You ran away," she murmured.He wasn't sure he liked the phrase, but nodded. "In a sense, I suppose, and as fast as I could. What's the point in looking back?"But he was looking back, Keeley thought. Looking back over his shoulder, because he was still running away.”

“I wasn't quite as certain that I knew her soul. When it came right down to it, I wasn't sure she knew me either.”

“awhile, adv.I love the vagueness of words that involve time. 'It took him awhile to come back' -- it could be a matter of minutes or hours, days or years. It is easy for me to say it took me awhile to know. That is about as accurate as I can get. There were sneak previews of knowing, for sure. Instance that made me feel, oh, this could be right, But the moment I shifted from a hope that needed to be proven to a certainty that would be continually challenged? There's no pinpointing that. Perhaps it never happened. Perhaps it happened while I was asleep. Most likely, there's no signal event. There's just the steady accumulation of 'awhile'.”

“I also talk a lot in Deeper Reading about the importance that confusion plays. When my students come to me, they think confusion is bad. They are wrong. Confusion is the place where learning occurs.”

“I can't be anything but what I am, Elle. If you want a man who is going to treat you like a broken doll, you sure as hell come to the wrong place. And if you expect me to step aside and let you make decisions that are ultimately going to harm you, then baby, you definitely have the wrong man because I protect my woman. Right or wrong, politically correct or not, I stand in front of her when there's need.”