“What I discovered I liked best about striking out on my bicycle was that the farther I got from home, the more interesting and unusual my thoughts became.”

“He'd discovered that his memories of that summer were like bad movie montages - young lovers tossing a Frisbee in the park, sharing a melting ice-cream cone, bicycling along the river, laughing, talking, kissing, a sappy score drowning out the dialogue because the screenwriter had no idea what these two people might say to each other.”

“To his surprise he...discovered that it was possible to be good at what you had little interest in, just as it had been possible to be bad at something…that you cared about a great deal.”

“It was hard to imagine him in love. I knew that he and my mother must have once felt passion, since that was what love entailed, but I was grateful that over time the madness had evolved into something more like friendship or a business partnership, something I myself could be an integral part of. Even seeing my father recollect passion was disconcerting.”

“Interesting, Miles thought. Like himself, Father Mark, as a child, had been reassured by the imagined proximity of God, whereas adults, perhaps because they so often were up to no good, took more comfort from His remoteness.”

“To his surprise he also discovered that it was possible to be good at what you had little interest in, just as it had been possible to be bad at something, whether painting or poetry, that you cared about a great deal.”

“Lucy, who apparently had no idea his girlfriend's father held him in such low regard, agreed with Noonan that he was pushing the envelope, behaviorwise. Still, he was genuinely fond of the man and didn't want to believe there was anything seriously wrong. After all, he argued, wasn't Mr. Berg's lunacy born of genius? Even though Lucy loved and defended Thomaston, he had to admit that the man was out of place there. He was despised by most faculty members and secretly made fun of, but even those who loathed him feared his acid wit, his searing intelligence. For all his eccentricity, he was the best teacher either of them had ever had, and honors was worth more than all their other classes combined, not so much in spite of its instructor being dangerously off center as because of it. The weirder things got, the more boundaries that were ignored, the more interesting things became. But what if one of the boundaries they were crossing was the one that separated sanity from madness? Lucy, perhaps out of loyalty to Sarah, didn't want to believe that this was what they were witnessing. Noonan, though, was apprehensive.”