“It's too late. Seventeen-year-olds don't need fathers.Oh god. I'm thirty-four years old and I need a father. I can't even begin to think what my daughter needs.”

“This is what I know. I look like my father. My father disappeared when he was seventeen years old. Hannah once told me that there is something unnatural about being older than your father ever got to be. When you can say that at the age of seventeen, it's a different kind of devastating.”

“Once, last year, I started going through my sins and Father Stephen said, "Oh, it's you, Josie." Can you believe it? He recognised me by my sins. I'm so boring that I can't even change my sins from term to term.”

“I met this boy here who I knew as a kid and his mum left him with a pedophile for two weeks when he was eight years old and I'm presuming you know everything there is to know about Jonah's father, and that my father is dead, and my mother hasn't been around for years, and God knows Jessa's real story. So what I'm saying here, Sergeant, is that we're just a tad low on the reliable adult quota so you have no right to be all self-righteous about what Chaz did and if you're going to go around not talking to him when his only crime was wanting me to have what he has, then I think you're going to turn out to be a bit of a dud and you know something? I'm just a bit over life's little disappointments right now. Do you understand what I'm saying?”

“What happens when she's not my memory anymore? What happens when she's not around to tell me about his belt leaving scars across my two-year-old brother's face or when he whacked her so hard that she lost her hearing for a week? Who'll be my memory?"Santangelo doesn't miss a beat. "I will. Ring me.""Same," Raffy says.I look at him. I can't even speak because if I do I know I'll cry but I smile and he knows what I'm thinking.”

“I don't despise you for what you allowed to happen to me. I despise you because when I was released, you refused to be found and I needed you more than anything in my life. Not to mend my broken bones, Arjuro. I needed my brother to mend my broken spirit.”

“When I saw "Ulysses" on Georgie's bedside table and Tom Finch's name written on it in a scrawl so like my old man's, I felt that I wanted to read it as a preparation for what's about to happen to us all. I understand where the brawny part of my father and I come from - Bill. I'm not saying bill's not smart, but my old man is a pretty intelligent guy and that kind of intellect came from tome Finch. I want to turn the pages he turned. But honestly I'm actually finding it hard. I think that the whole world has lied and nobody has read the book completely. It's a conspiracy up there with Roswell.”