“I could lie down like a tired child, And weep away the life of care Which I have borne, and yet must bear,— Till death like sleep might steal on me And I might feel in the warm air My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony.”

“In the instant before the door opened, I could almost sense my life expanding just like a river whose waters have begun to swell; for I had never before taken such a drastic step to change the course of my own future. I was like a child tiptoeing along a precipice overlooking the sea. And yet somehow I hadn't imagined a great wave might come and strike me there, and wash everything away.”

“Like most, I was a solitary boy at first, keeping to my books and weeping in the hedgerows whenever I could get away on my own. Surely, I thought, I must be the saddest child in the world; that there must be something innately horrid about me to cause my father to cast me off so heartlessly. I believed that if I could discover what it was, there might be a chance of putting things right, of somehow making it up to him.”

“How do you feel? (Maggie)Like I got hit by a bus that decided to back up a few times and make sure it finished the job. I think it must have ground its tires on my ribs during the last run. You know, just in case I might actually want to breathe again in my lifetime. (Wren)”

“I regret profoundly that I was not an American and not born in Greenwich Village. It might be dying, and there might be a lot of dirt in the air you breathe, but this is where it's happening.”

“..the fields might fall to fallow and the birds might stop their song awhile; the growing things might die and lie in silence under snow, while through it all the cold sea wore its face of storms and death and sunken hopes...and yet unseen beneath the waves a warmer current ran that, in its time, would bring the spring.”