“In World War One, they called it shell shock. Second time around, they called it battle fatigue. After 'Nam, it was post-traumatic stress disorder.”

“While most people took family for granted, he [Father Tim] took it for grace.”

“Why can't life always be lived under the stars,' she said, 'with great music and family and friends?”

“... for fog was merely a cloud that wasn't too smitten with itself to visit terra firma.”

“Professor Morgan had called [Dooley] 'a lad of few words.' That wasn't true. There were words spilling around in him all the time. Too many words. His problem was organizing them.”

“That was his favorite thing about booksthey took you off to other peoples lives an places, but you could still set in your own chair by thoil heater, warm as a mouse in a churn.”

“It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.”

“If I am going to be drownedif I am going to be drownedif I am going to be drowned, why, in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and t...”

“I'm an Earth ecstatic, and my creed is simple: All life is sacred, life loves life, and we are capable of improving our behavior toward one another. As basic as that is, for me it's also tonic and ...”

“I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people-to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole, to see the cause and think it's the effect or vice versa”

“At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear.”

“I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.”