“The only problem with him and Henry was they were like Charlie Brown and Lucy. The only difference was once in a while Henry would hold onto the football so Eddie could kick it--not often, but once in a while. Eddie had even thought, when in one of his heroin dazes, that he ought to write Charles Schultz a letter. Dear Mr. Schultz, he would say. You're missing a bet by ALWAYS having Lucy pull the football up at the last second. She ought to hold it down there once in a while. Nothing Charlie Brown could ever predict, you understand.Sometimes she'd maybe hold it down for him to kick three, even four times in a row, then nothing for a month, then once, and then nothing for three or four days, and then, you know, you get the idea. That would REALLY fuck the kid up, you know?”

“She put a hand on his hip and turned him to her. "But things could go wrong, so i want to tell you something while it's just the two of us, Eddie. I want to tell you how much I love you." She spoke simply, with no drama.I know you do," he said, "but I'll be damned if I know why."Because you made me feel whole," she said. "When I was younger, I used to vacillate between thinking love was this great and glorious mystery and thinking it was just something a bunch of Hollywood move producers made up to sell more tickets in the Depression, when Dish Night kind of played out."Eddie laughed. Now I think that all of us are born with a hole in our hearts, and we go around looking for the person who can fill it. You...Eddie, you fill me up.”

“Love", I said, "is the rug they pull out from under you. Love is Lucy always lifting the football at the last second so that Charlie Brown falls on his ass. Love is something that every time you believe in it, it goes away. Love is for suckers, and I'm not going to be a sucker ever again.”

“A kid of your age—any kid—could get hold of matches if she wanted to, burn up the house or whatever. But not many do. Why would they want to?”

“sure, we need the gypsies. we always have. because if you don't have someone to run out of town once in a while, how are you going to know you yourself belong there?”

“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.”

“Do you believe in an afterlife?" the gunslinger asked him as Brown dropped three ears of hot corn onto his plate.Brown nodded. "I think this is it.”