“Maybe there are moments between any two adults in love when the age of one of them dissolves before the other's eyes, when the first refuge of the soul at its creation is laid bare and skinless as a sunbeam through a window. Innocence and vulnerability, two unmeasurable quantities...Perhaps that is the essence of the protection's intimacy, that it dwells in camouflage and justifies itself in stillness.”

“Wherever love comes from, whatever is its genesis, it isn’t like a quantity of gold or diamonds, even water in the earth-a fixed quantity, Fos thought. You can’t use up love, deplete it at its source. Love exists beyond fixed limits. Beyond what you can see or count.”

“Because way back before you were even born there was this girl you see. And I fell in love with her. It was something that I wanted-love-not because it was expected of me, but because I found it out my self-that happiness of wanting to be with that other person.”

“Her father...was all front to back in his transparency: what you saw was what there was, there was nothing clandestine in his character, and those few aspects that were disguised or hidden were that way because they were his closely kept emotions. When on those rare occasions he allowed his emotions to be seen, their appearance was all the more surprising. And more powerful. Which taught her early on a thing or two about the power of what's visible -- it derives its mystery from what it hides. How many stories had she heard of people sensing ghosts behind the walls, hobgoblins in the woods? People living on the shores of lakes since time began have conjured creatures from those depths. If you believe a thing is something different from the evidence before you, if you believe something is hidden by the wall or in the woods or beneath the surface of the lake, then that belief gives power to the darkness and the depths -- power to enchant; to terrify.”

“The sight of Fos and Opal coming down the street together absolutely tickled him. The idea of two such strangely unremarkable yet lovable people could have found and met each other reaffirmed his waning faith in anything remotely optimistic about mankind and seemed to be a more convincing proof than all the gospel shit flown from the pulpits of Knox County that life could, in fact, distribute happy endings.”

“You think you know someone by looking at his face but what can one face say about the thousand thoughts behind those eyes.”

“Art, their father had frequently told them, was exactly that: to make art is the realize another's sadness within, realize the hidden sadness in other people's lives, to feel with and for a stranger.”