“The older Kit gets, the less confident he feels judging other people as spouses or parents. These days, driving past the home of the Naked Hemp Society, he finds himself more curious than contemptu...”

“Ready how? Who's ever ready for anything important?”

“But people, as Alan had once reflected to Greenie, were not at all like recipes. You could have all the right ingredients, in all the right amounts, and still there were no guarantees. Or perhaps t...”

“I guess thats how well you know me. You think I like hearing this news.Im sorry. This is selfish. I just need to tell someone outside my life. Get it out of myhead, to keep from going nuts, but so...”

“I come from a culture of handwringers, vengeance seekers, people who name children after ancestors by rote -- first child, paternal grandfather, second child, maternal, and on and on and on.”

“SWEET POTATO BISQUE WITH CRABMEATGRAPEFRUIT ICE IN A SWEET TORTILLA CRISPLAMB SEARED IN ANCHO CHILI PASTE ON POLENTA TWO CHUTNEYS: PEAR & MINTASPARAGUS FLANAMERICAN GOAT CHEESE, EAST & WEST, WITH R...”

“I guess thats how well you know me. You think I like hearing this news.Im sorry. This is selfish. I just need to tell someone outside my life. Get it out of myhead, to keep from going nuts, but so...”

“To understand the truth of everything,it took guts more than simply thinking.”

“We all smiled because it was the truth: Living did take a lot more guts than giving up.”

“Only once in your life, I truly believe, you find someone who can completely turn your world around. You tell them things that youve never shared with another soul and they absorb everything you sa...”

“As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”

“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there i...”

“Well," a female voice said. "What have we here?""Here," Bethany said, responding to the woman's rhetorical question, "we have a teenager. And she's pissed.”