“...drawn to the cities where you'd hear a voice kissing and talking deep love in every shadow of the ditch, and you passing on with an empty, hungry stomach failing from your heart...”

“One’s mother country is better than all else, and gloomy is life when a man sees not his home each morning”

“A man who is not afraid of the sea will soon be drownded, for he will be going out on a day he shouldn't. But WE do be afraid of the sea, and we do only be drownded now and again.”

“Hi honey, I’m home! Take your pants off!” Wesley announced. He kissed my cheek as he passed me and put his lunch container in the sink.”

“There is no position outside of reason where you can stand and lecture about reason and pass judgment on reason.”

“Why should our rulers, normally phlegmatic men, react with sudden hysteria to the pinpricks of terrorism when for decades they were able to go about their everyday business unruffled, in full awareness that in a deep bunker somewhere in the Urals an enemy watched and waited with a finger on a button, ready if provoked to wipe them and their cities from the face of the earth?”

“Stacey muttered, "But I hate this school, and this city, and the sooner I leave, the better. I want to start over in a new place. I haven't . . ." her voice trailed off and she looked away from Jason, hoping instead to find her words among the falling raindrops. "Do you ever feel like you aren't the person you're supposed to be? That you could be a different person - and have a better life - if things had been just a little different?”