“Fleetingly he wondered what the man's life had been like, where it had gone so desperately wrong. No one tried to end up like this, alone and defenseless and poor, eking a living from the harsh Arizona desert.”

“I don’t know if it was just me making things up in my head but after the fear in their eyes had gone what replaced it was like a sad kind of wondering. A wondering of where the old me was hiding. A wondering about where the old me had gone to. It was like I had suddenly been taken over by someone else and they could see the old me had fallen away for good.”

“Chase was gone then, and Donnie was back, alone in his room, wondering about those pictures from an art book he'd so admired. Because it felt like he'd just lived one, and it had been beautiful, so beautiful, and he'd been able to reach out and touch the lines of it, but it still hurt.”

“In the end, I think that I will like that we were sitting on the bed, talking & wondering where the time had gone.”

“No one was ever good enough for anybody's precious sons. No one ever called daughters precious, and why was that? Things had not changed very much. In the end women like Emily and Ingrid and Freya and Joanna only had one another to lean on. The men were wonderful when they were around, but their fires burned too bright, they lived too close to the sun - look what happened to her boy, and to her man. Gone. Women only had one another in the end.”

“Life was such a strange thing, so permanent when one had it, so fleeting when it was lost- and those who lost it could never tell you what it was like, could they?”