“I go out on the side of a hill, maybe hunting deer, and sit there and see the shadow of night coming over the hill, and I can swear to you there is a part of me that is absolutely untouched by anything civilized. There's a part of me that has never heard of a telephone.”

“You can live your life in "should" and never change anything. What's done is done. We buried our dead. I went home. Manuel went to Shadowed Hills to hate me in peace.”

“I hate that there are so many sides of him that I don't understand, and I don't know if I even want to keep trying to understand them. There are parts of him that I love, parts of him that I hate. But there's a part of him that does nothing but disappoint me, and that's the absolute hardest part to accept.”

“Midville's best street was High Street. It was up on a hill. Not much of a hill, to tell the truth, but in that part of the state, the flat south-central part, hills are not taken for granted.”

“You alone became the outer surface of my life, the side I never see, and you will be that, the unknown part of me, until I die.”

“Call me jaded, but I didn't see then and I don't see now how hugging, and counting and focusing on a flickering candle or, God help me, a favorite stuffed animal, can possibly make you forget the nine pounds of wriggling human forcing its way out of you the same way it got into you nine months-and nine pounds-ago.As the scientific theory goes, what goes in must come out. Eventually. Somehow. And the coming-out part is never as much fun as the going in part. ”