“Facts are the barren branches on which we hang the dear, obscuring foliage of our dreams.”

“I was having that dream again, the good one where we're all in heaven and never heard of Treegap.”

“Here, child, said Mae hastily Hide your eyes. Boys? Are you decent? What'd you put on to swim in? I got Winnie Foster in the house? For goodness sake ma said Jesse emerging from the stairwell . You think were going to march around in our altogether with Winnie Foster in the house? And Miles behind him sain we just jumped in with our clothes on too tired to shed them It was true. They stood there side by side with their wet clothes plastered to their skins, little pools of water collecting at their feet.”

“The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color.”

“You can't have living without dying. So you can't call it living, what we got. We just are, we just be, like rocks beside the road.”

“The ownership of land is an odd thing when you come to think of it. How deep, after all, can it go? If a person owns a piece of land, does he own it all the way down, in ever narrowing dimensions, till it meets all other pieces at the center of the earth? Or does ownership consist only of a thin crust under which the friendly worms have never heard of trespassing?”

“Life's got to be lived, no matter how long or short. You got to take what comes.”