“What kind of fool had he been, to throw away romance untried?”

“Mia and I had been together for more than two years, and yes, it was a high school romance, but it was still the kind of romance where I thought we were trying to find a way to make it forever, the kind that, had we met five years later and had she not been some cello prodigy and had I not been in a band on the rise - or had our lives not been ripped apart by all this -I was pretty sure it would've been.”

“How many times would I throw this away before I realized it was what I had been looking for all along?”

“What a curious kind of fool a girl is. Never been licked in school. What's a licking?”

“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”

“Ned knew what it was like to feel useless. He had been the expendable grandchild, the non-heir. He'd been the fool, the idiot, the one who could be counted on to muck up anything worth doing. His grandfather had expected nothing of Ned, and Ned, young idiot that he had been, had delivered spectacularly.”