“Eagles had made a realist of him. He believed in facts, and in altering your viewpoint to fit them, no matter what they were. That was the way you survived and stayed sane; it was hard, it meant sacrifices—he had already lost many things that he valued deeply—but it was the only way.”

“There were only so many ways a man‟s heart could break, and he had a feeling his couldn‟t survive another puncture.”

“He had lived and acted on the assumption that he was alone, and now he saw that he had not been. What he had done made others suffer. No matter how much he would long for them to forget him, they would not be able to. His family was a part of him, not only in blood, but in spirit.”

“What had happened? As he asked himself the question, he knew the answer. That no one had thought fit to tell him! No one! It was a bitter pill for him to swallow. He had been forgotten. Yet he had always wished to be forgotten. He could not have it both ways.”

“He did not feel that he was stealing, for the cleaver, the radio, the money, and the typewriter were all on the same level of value, all meant the same thing to him. They were the serious toys of the men who lived in the dead world of sunshine and rain he had left, the world that had condemned him, branded him guilty.”

“He cried that night for all that he had lost, but he would say it taught him a valuable lesson: that holding on to things "will only break your heart.”

“…was designed to protect his heart, to bind me and bribe me to stay with him no matter what. He was giving everything he had.”

“The best way to manage people, he thought, was to convince them that you were good for their careers. He further believed that the only way to get people to believe that you were good for their careers was actually to be good for their careers.”

“The reason for his anguish, the intolerable burden which had broken him at last, was the simplest thing in the world: he loved his wife. He always had, and he always would. Nothing could change that, but that was what had made his agony bite so deep, the reason he couldn't forgive himself for not somehow making things "all right" again… and the reason he'd had to turn to someone else to rebuild himself when the collapse came. It had been cowardly of him, in many ways, but he simply could not have made himself dump his weakness, his collapse on her shoulders while she coped with everything God had already done to her.”

“His books were the closest thing he had to furniture and he lived in them the way other men live in easy chairs.”