“It took him forever to get to downtown Vancouver although Tony had to admit that saving the world by public transportation was a particularly Canadian way to do things.”

“First paycheck I get, I thought, I'm going to get myself a room near the downtown L.A. Public Library.”

“He was doing Tony’s dirty work, in a way—like Tony had done his in New York. One hand washing the other, neither of them getting clean.”

“At That Moment, it seemed the whole world cared what happened to him. All those people were hugging him and petting his hair. Everybody asked if he was okay.It seemed that moment would last forever. That you had to risk your life to get love. You had to get right to the edge of death to ever be saved.”

“No one had ever told them they were worth saving, and they were taught to believe they were forever lost to a world of thievery, prostitution and murder. But it wasn’t true. They were capable of more. She could tell from the way some of them helped each other, the way others sat down at once to begin sewing, the way Ann took aside one of the little boys and patiently showed him how to pick a pocket—”

“When gangs took over the [abandoned public land in Philadelphia] and the neighborhood took a turn for the worse, horses became a way of saving lives. By getting boys interested in raising a horse rather than killing another human being, these cowboys gave the youth something positive: father figures, focus, and the ability to stand tall.”