“I hope someday she meets just the right man and has babies - a whole passel of babies, more than I could have - so she understands how it kills me now that she won't let me hug her when she's in obvious distress. (The Life You've Imagined)”

“We all have the best laid plans for our children, and they go and ruin it all by growing up any way they want to. What the hell was it all for, then? (Real Life and Liars)”

“When I was a kid, my mom once told me that God was an artist and how on occasion He’d throw a bucketful of paint across the sky for us all to see. I asked her why the paint disappeared by morning, and she told me that if the sky was always like that we might take it for granted. I suppose she was right. Maybe that’s what war is all about—so we can appreciate times of peace.”

“It wasn’t enough, just knowing that Noelle was alive and on her way back to us. So I sat there wondering if Noelle had screamed when she was taken. And if she had, why hadn’t anyone heard?”

“My mother said she already knew how I was. She could tell I was like that since I was a baby. She told me a story about when I was a toddler. She said that one day, she heard an alarm clock ringing in her room and when she went inside, she saw me bent over it. When she got closer, she could she me shaking baby powder on it!“What are you doing, Joey?” She asked me.“Baby crying,” was my reply.”

“Hopefully one of these days, I'll see past all that. Get back to the memories of before, when things are right and it really was just you and me. Back when I was stupid enough to think it would be forever.”

“She is one of those ladies who is more beautiful at sixty than she could possibly have been at twenty. (how I hope someone says that about me someday)!”