“The poems are all wrong. It's a bang, a really big bang. Not a whimper. And sometimes gold can stay.”

“What we had went so much deeper than a kiss. When we were together, she turned me completely inside out. It didn't matter if we were dead or alive. We could never be kept apart. There were some things more powerful than worlds or universes. She was my world, as much as I was hers. What we had, we knew. The poems are all wrong. It's a bang, a really big bang. Not a whimper. And sometimes gold can stay. Anybody who's ever been in love can tell you that.”

“There’s something about sitting alone in the dark that reminds you how big the world really is, and how far apart we all are. The stars look like they’re so close, you could reach out and touch them. But you can’t. Sometimes things look a lot closer than they are.”

“Macon EthanI lay my head down on his chest and cried because had livedbecause he had dieda dry ocean, a desert of emotionhappysad darklight sorrowjoy swept over me, under mei could hear the sound but i could not understand the words and then i realized the sound was me, breakingin one moment i was feeling everything and i was feeling nothingi was shattered, i was saved, i lost everthing, i was given everything elsesomething in me died, something in me was born, i only knewthe girl was gonewhoever i was now, i would never be her again this is the waythe world ends not with a bang but a whimperclaim yourself claim yourself claim yourself claimgratitude fury love despair hope hatefirst green is gold but nothing green can staydonttrynothinggreencanstay-Lena Duchannes”

“A kiss that was every bit as big and every bit as small as a kiss can be.”

“It wasn't that he was a Confederate. Everyone in Gatlin County was related to the wrong side in the War Between the States. We were used to that by now. It was like being born in Germany after World War II, being from Japan after Pearl Harbor, or America after Hiroshima. History was a bitch sometimes. You couldn't change where you were from. But still, you didn't have to stay there. You didn't have to stay stuck in the past, like the ladies in DAR, or the Gatlin Historical Society, or the Sisters. And you didn't have to accept that things had to be the way they were, like Lena. Ethan Carter Wate hadn't, and I couldn't, either.”

“History was a bitch sometimes. You couldn’t change where you were from. But still, you didn’t have to stay there. You didn’t have to stay stuck in the past, like the ladies in the DAR, or the Gatlin Historical Society, or the Sisters. And you didn’t have to accept that things had to be the way they were, like Lena.”