“Without any effort of his will, or power to restrain himself, he shrieked aloud; an outcry that went pealing through the night, and was beaten back from one house to another, and reverberated from the hills in the background; as if a company of devils, detecting so much misery and terror in it, had made a plaything of the sound and were bandying it to and fro.”

“He didn't see the look his brothers shared or overhear the vow they made to one another--that if any one of the four of them were to make it back from Ticonderoga, it would be Iain.”

“His eyes twinkled mischievously as he gazed at me with that look that always made me melt: as if I were edible and he could barely restrain himself from taking a bite.”

“Suspended for fighting. It had a ring. Not simply suspended, which could be for any number of inane infractions from skipping algebra to drawing nude cartoons of the principal and his staff on random backgrounds. Suspended ... for FIGHTING! It made you sound like something. Like a real badass dude from way back.”

“He came back from France when Tom and Daisy were still on their wedding trip, and made a miserable but irresistible journey to Louisville on the last of his army pay. He stayed there a week, walking the streets where their footsteps had clicked together through the November night and revisiting the out-of-the-way places to which they had driven in her white car. Just as Daisy's house had always seemed to him more mysterious and gay than other houses so his idea of the city itself, even though she was gone from it, was pervaded with a melancholy beauty.”

“That night, [Black Dog] lay beside Henry, and he stroked her sharp shoulder blades and scratched behind her ears. He did this late into the night as he listened to the low and terrible moans that swept through the hallways of the house and that were not from the lonely wind but from his lonely mother, who had lost her oldest child and would never have him back again.”