“Later, with strange galaxies turning in slow gavotte overhead, neither thought the act of love had ever been so sweet, so full”

“and so will the world end, I think, a victim of love rather than hate. For love's ever been the more destructive weapon, sure.”

“On the so-called Kissing Bridge in Bassey Park, amid the declarations of school spirit and undyng love, someone had carved the words I WILL KILL MY MOTHER SOON, and below it someone had added: NOT SOON ENOUGH SHES FULL OF DISEEZE.”

“surely they had passed the worst. All the luck had been against them, but sooner or later even the worst luck changes.”

“Sometimes she'd go a whole day without thinking of him or missing him. Why not? She had quite a full life, and really, he'd often been hard to deal with and hard to live with. A project, the Yankee oldtimers like her very own Dad might have said. And then sometimes a day would come, a gray one (or a sunny one) when she missed him so fiercely she felt empty, not a woman at all anymore but just a dead tree filled with cold November blow. She felt like that now, felt like hollering his name and hollering him home, and her heart turned sick with the thought of the years ahead and she wondered what good love was if it came to this, to even ten seconds of feeling like this.”

“It had been no struggle to turn his face to the south and leave it behind — but it had hurt his heart.”

“The sky was the yellow color of old cheese and the clouds flew across it, as if they had seen something horrifying in the desert wastes where they had so lately been.”