“A large battalion of my thoughts was marching determinedly on its way to Annoyance but it was distracted and took a wrong turn at Adam and found, to its surprise, that it had ended up in the entirely different destination of Dreamy Contentment.”

“For a moment, I wondered how different my life would have been had they been my parents, but I shook the thought away. I knew my father had done the best he could, and I had no regrets about the way I'd turned out. Regrets about the journey, maybe, but not the destination. Because however it had happened, I'd somehow ended up eating shrimp in a dingy downtown shack with a girl that I already knew I'd never forget.”

“Determined to be different, destined to be the same”

“I'll be right behind you"behind her? Thirty-two steps with him looking at her butt?"No, you wont.""Look, it's late, i'm tired, can we just-""it'll be a cold day in hell when you follow me up those steps. You want to go up, you go first.""Why?" he said mystified"you're not looking at my rear end all the way up that hill."Cal sighed and took the first step. "wait a minute. Now you'll be looking at my butt all the way up the steps.""yes but you probably have a great butt," Min said. "it's an entirely different dynamic.”

“He believed in Communism the way most people believed in God: he would not be greatly surprised or disappointed if he turned out to be wrong, and meanwhile it made little difference to the way he lived.”

“You can't say it's a fair way to determine right or wrong one day, and then say it's unfair the next because you don't like the outcome.”