“And will I tell you that these three lived happily ever after? I will not, for no one ever does. But there was happiness. And they did live.”

“No one ever does live happily ever after, but we leave the children to find that out for themselves.”

“I know your mother lives in your head - almost everyone's mother does, I guess - but you can't let her have her way on this one”

“She was frightened because she was realizing – too late, too late – that what's done can't be undone, and what's remembered must somehow be lived with ever after. Even of the memories are insane.”

“The terror, which would not end for another 28 years-if it ever did end-began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.”

“Best not to look back. Best to believe there will be happily ever afters all the way around - and so there may be; who is to say there will not be such endings? Not all boats which sail away into darkness never find the sun again, or the hand of another child; if life teaches anything at all, it teaches that there are so many happy endings that the man who believes there is no God needs his rationality called into serious question..”

“I the sweetness of our lives did not depart, there would be no sweetness at all.”