“A good night sleep, or a ten minute bawl, or a pint of chocolate ice cream, or all three together, is good medicine.”

“I was a crazy creature with a head full of carnival spangles until I was thirty, and then the only man I ever really cared for stopped waiting and married someone else. So in spite, in anger at mys...”

“And in the years when your shadow leaned clear across the land as you lay abed nights with your heartbeat mounting to the billions, his invention must let a man drowse easy in the falling leaves li...”

“The beginning of wisdom, as they say. When you're seventeen you know everything. When you're twenty-seven if you still know everything you're still seventeen.”

“and sleeping put an end to summer, 1928,”

“There it is."And he watched with now-gentle sorrow and now-quick delight, and at last quiet acceptance as all the bits and pieces of his house mixed, stirred, settled, poised, and ran steadily agai...”

“No," said a voice, "the only thing wrong on a night like that is that there is a world and you must come back to it.”

“Too late, I found you can't wait to become perfect, you got to go out and fall down and get up with everybody else.”

“Her eyes reversed into herself, to watch the secret heart of herself pounding itself into pieces against the side of her chest.”

“God bless the lawn mower, he thought. Who was the fool who made January first New Years Day? No, they should set a man to watch the grasses across a million Illinois, Ohio, and Iowa lawns, and on t...”

“They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked high...”

“The world seemed to shimmer a little at the edges.”

“If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and...”