“We started out making men in about the state of mind which I suppose created them in the first place -- we had run out of kinds of women, and had to think of something else.”

“Can't you make them stop?' I asked her that day, wondering if there was anything in this woman I could speak to, if she had ever run joyfully over grass, or had watched flowers, or known delight or love.”

“Our house is old, and noisy, and full. when we moved into it we had two children and about five thousand books; I expect that when we finally overflow and move out again we will have perhaps twenty children and easily half a million books; we also own assorted beds and tables and chairs and rocking horses and lamps and doll dresses and ship models and paint brushes and literally thousands of socks.”

“Upstairs Margaret said abruptly, 'I suppose it starts to happen first in the suburbs,' and when Brad said, 'What starts to happen?' she said hysterically, 'People starting to come apart.”

“There had not been this many words sounded in our house for a long time, and it was going to take a while to clean them out.”

“All I could think of when I got a look at the place from the outside was what fun it would be to stand out there and watch it burn down.”

“We were going to the long field which today looked like an ocean, although I had never seen an ocean; the grass was moving in the breeze and the cloud shadows passed back and forth and the trees in the distance moved.”