“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.”

“In our town there is a secret spot where you can still see the stars at night, believe it or not. It is the only spot like that left, unclouded by the dwindling skyscrapers rising nearby. It is a good place to go to walk and talk in whispers. Following the little hill that rises from the park to a small clearing which overlooks the statue of the armless general on his bronze steed, most of us later remember this spot as the first place we knew we might be in love.”

“-Are you ready to return to the outside world, Billy?-No, definitely not, sir.-Well, you can't stay here forever now, can you?-Why not? I'm not bothering anybody, sir.-Because it's not healthy. You're a very special young man, Billy. It's time you found that out on your own, out there. The world may not be as terrible as you think.-I would like to stay here one more month, if I may, sir.-One more month? Why?-Summer will be over, sir. I can't go out there if it's going to be summertime.-And why not?-I wouldn't want to see any young girls playing. I would not want to see any flowers outside.-Why?-Because everything happy right now is going to die.-But Billy...-I would not like to be reminded of anything pretty.-But Billy, of course, anything might...-I would not like to be reminded.-OK, OK. We will se what we can do, Billy.”

“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.”

“Kristin nods, marching ahead of Clark, who gazes as the impossible smallness of Kristin’s ankles and feet. Years later, while imprisoned for drug charges, he will think of those tiny feet and know he is forever doomed for having lied to her, for having harmed something so delicate, so defenseless, so small, so weak.”

“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.”

“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,”