“He scart me," the girl said.Miss Mary nodded and looked over at her in a slow, tired way. "That's your common sense talkin'," she said. "That man scare anybody got common sense.”

“I was tired in ways that had nothing to do with sleep. It occurred to me, sitting in the car with her, that I had been trying to hold too many things together that were meant to fall apart.”

“Sometimes," he said, "you've got to watch people a long time to see who they are.”

“He was a newspaperman,' he said, 'but there's some people who should never leave Savannah.”

“A newspaper story, like anything else, is more attractive from a distance, when it first comes to you, than it is when you get in close and agonize over the details. Which I presume is how Yardley got in the habit of keeping himself at a distance.”

“In the beginning the stories were long and colored, but as he grew old and his eyes clouded, the stories were told in only a few words, and she came to understand that all the colors had fallen away from him, leaving only the moments. A woman who performed tricks in the air, an animal pulling a boat under water, dead children who spoke in bones. A man who loved bottles.”

“To see certain things, you have to be lying on your back with tears in your eyes and a scalding potato in your mouth. It's possible, I think, that you have to be hurt to see anything at all.”