“Could all be lies. Could all be part of revenge scheme, planned during his decade behind bars. But if true, then what? […] Never mind. Answers soon. Nothing is insoluble.”
“It seems strange to many people that I should be impressed by the wonders and beauties of Niagara. They are always asking: ‘what does this beauty or that music mean to you? You cannot see the waves rolling up the beach or hear their roar. What do they mean to you?’ In the most evident sense they mean everything.”
“Rising, street-car, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, street-car, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm—this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the “why” arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.”
“But why? Why move? We’ve got a better place to live right now. We’ve got all the food we want. We’ve got electricity, and lights, and running water. I can’t understand why everybody talks about changing things.”
“I should flee, get away. They will turn on me next unless I go. But where to? What am I to do? Lose myself. Die in the forest. I look around. Eyes, hard with hatred, slide from mine. Mouths twitch between leering and sneering. I will not run away into the forest, because that is what they want me to do.”
“There’s some stuff I don’t understand about this accident—like why it happened and why Robbie had to die and why I didn’t die. Mama keeps huggin’ me, sayin’, ‘Praise the Lord’ and stuff like that. But what about Robbie’s mama? What is she saying?”
“But before you start pointing fingers, let me ask you: is what I did really so bad? So bad I deserved to die? So bad I deserved to die like that? Is what I did really so much worse than what anybody else does? Is it really so much worse than what you do?”
“Have I done you a favor? thought Eduardo as he watched the baby turn its head toward the bustling nurses in their starched, white uniforms. Will you thank me for it later?”
“He went back. Robert went back. We’d just had that quarrel- aw, you wouldn’t remember, but I do, little as I want to. Robert went back to the old place. Now why do you reckon?”
“A robin puffed its breast on a rose tree and squeaked at him. Barney suddenly wasn’t sure that he believed in Stig himself. It wasn’t a Stiggish day, like yesterday when he had fallen down the pit.”
″‘The thing is,’ Mark went on, ‘was it just an accident, or did we want so much to be magic we got that way, somehow? The thing is, each of us ought to make a wish. That’ll prove it one way or the other.‘”
″‘Well, well! Who’d have thought it!’ exclaimed Charlemagne. ‘And how do you do your job, then, if you don’t exist?’
‘By will power,’ said Agilulf, ‘and faith in our holy cause.‘”
“In the first place, the Browns are a fighting family. One may question their wisdom, or wit, or beauty, but about their fight there can be no question.”
“It feels like a victory that we are moving closer to the truth. But when the truth is taking you somewhere you don’t want to go, you also aren’t sure. You aren’t sure you want that win.”