“It was always so hot, and everyone was so polite, and everything was all surface but underneath it was like a bomb waiting to go off. I always felt that way about the South, that beneath the smiles and southern hospitality and politeness were a lot of guns and liquor and secrets.”

“...since I was a little boy, she had always wanted me to go. She was always sending me off on a bus someplace, to elementary school, to camp, to relatives in Kentucky, to college. She pushed me away from her just as she'd pushed my elder siblings away when we lived in New York, literally shoving them out the front door when they left for college. ”

“God I am looking for the one thing I have never felt but once, and I would walk through heaven and earth to find it, if he would but let me find him, so that I could feel it; and if I were to feel it again I would never leave that feeling, or him that gave it to me." - The Dreamer”

“No wonder I'd always felt lost. I actually was. The knowledge felt terrible, but in a strange way, it also felt good. Now I knew why I'd never connected to anything. Why I felt like I was outside the world around me, moving at a different speed from everyone else. That amputated piece of me explained everything, even why I'd failed at college. But that kind of blanket excuse can be dangerous. Crutches usually are.”

“Please stop,” I said politely—he was that big. One should always mind one’s manners around big things.”

“My parents were nonmaterialistic. They believed that money without knowledge was worthless, that education tempered with religion was the way to climb out of poverty in America, and over the years they were proven right.”

“There's such a big difference between being dead and alive, I told myself, and the greatest sin a person can do to another is to take away that life. Next to that, all the rules and religions in the world are secondary; mere words and beliefs that people choose to believe and kill and hate by. My life won't be lived that way, and neither, I hope, will my children's.”