“I could quote enough Nietzsche to bore someone into a coma, solve mathematical problems so beautiful they'd make Pythagoras cry; I could talk so much bullshit the listener didn't know if I was coming or going, but I had gotten to know Rickie well enough to realize that I had no idea how a woman's mind worked.”

“The sting of her abandonment had not lessened through the years, and I suspected it would never go away. Occasionally, I could see agony in her eyes, the shadows that flickered in the background. If I could, I'd take her pain and make it my own. I'd swallow it like a bitter pill and live with the consequences.”

“If I could slam the door, I would. If I could walk to another room, I would. The best I can do is turn and head for the far corner of my cell. In prison, even goodbyes are beyond my control.”

“She didn't want me; she wanted all of me. I didn't mind saying it. My girlfriend scared the crap out of me.”

“She had never been to college, and I often wondered where her life would have led under different circumstances. She might have been a physician or an attorney, a CEO or a professor. Instead, she was stuck in Silvington, Indiana, married to a construction worker, and trying anything she could think of to save her child.”

“Truth may start out timid, but it finishes bold.”

“I wonder now, with everything said and done, if things would have been different had I remembered what the Tree had told me. Would I have made the same decisions, the same mistakes? Where would I be, had I remembered? Had I listened? I have learned in my short time here on this world that we as humans are all capable of a great many things, our minds able to process so much. Too much, really. But our greatest curse, our greatest folly, if you will, is our ability of hindsight.Of regret.Oh, Seven. How I wish I would have known.”