“I’ve been thinking alot and it’s not that anyone did anything wrong. We just didn’t know what we wanted. We weren’t thepeople we were supposed to be yet,”

“Listen, I’m going to give you some advice, not because Ithink you need it, but because I feel like I’ve earned it. The right, I mean. To give advice. Here it is:don’t hold onto things. It’s a problem the men in my family have. It’s taken me a long time to figurethis out. Me, my father, my grandfather, we collect things. We collect miseries. It’s what we do. Butsometimes the best thing to do is to just let things go. To let them pass.”

“His face almost looked the way it did when he was a teenager, when there was the subtle expression of both confidence and mischief in his darkly handsome eyes. When I think of him now, though, I don’t picture his face the way it is. What I see is from a memory, from a moment when he must have been eleven or twelve years old and we were both in our backyard and it was summertime and I was drawing in a coloring book and he was there in the green grass and he didn’t know I was watching him. He was crawling around on all fours; he was practicing being a lion or a tiger or more probably a leopard and he was growling to himself, stalking the shadow of a bird, and he didn’t see me staring at him and I think my mother was there, looking at us from an upstairs window, watching us both and gently smiling, and what I remember most is that all of us were happy then with who we were at that moment; at that moment, all of us were quietly happy.”

“We have fun acting like this, acting like we are incredibly offended. Really, we are just bored to tears with everything.”

“He wants to say: First ofall, you were wrong about pop music. And art and all of pop culture. And all kinds of things.Because all of it matters. Even if it is awful. Everybody knows all the bad movies and the badsongs on the radio. Because it’s the only thing anybody has in common anymore. It’s all anybodyhas. So you were wrong about that and you were wrong about us and you were wrong about me,but he doesn’t actually say any of this out loud.”

“It is what we see when we imagine what the afterlife must be like: our happiest triumphs, our most sincere moments, stolen from the seam of our lives, a respite just before the onset of imminent tragedy.”

“We did something very simple," Effie says."Yes, and what was that?"Effie Mumford stares off the porch into the night sky. The first stars of the evening are quietly arriving, and Billy, following her gaze, listens as the small girl speaks."We allowed ourselves, for one brief moment, to believe in something we could not see.”