“you can't hide from a hurricane under a beach umbrella”

“But by the third year he had come to wonder whether Laura's purpose wasn't the shield behind which he was still hiding his own, even from himself.”

“Who are they now? They are the simplest version possible of themselves... They are out from under everything ever piled on top of them.”

“That's the trouble with a story spinner. You never know what's real and what's made up. Even when they are telling the truth, they can't stop themselves from spinning it into something better; something prettier, with more of a pattern to it.”

“To pay for my father's funeral I borrowed money from people he already owed money to. One called him a nobody. No, I said, he was a failure. You can't remember a nobody's name, that's why they're called nobodies. Failures are unforgettable.”

“Home is a boxcar and it's so far out of reachHidden under umbrella beach”

“When you get a cat to catch the mice in your kitchen, you can't expect it to ignore the rats in the cellar.”