“[Bobby Tom] finally understood Gracie's function in his life. She was God's joke on him.”

“In the end, we should simply imagine a joke; a long joke that's being continually retold in an accent too thick and too strange to ever be completely understood. Life is that joke. The soul is its punchline.”

“She had made him possible. In that sense she was his god. Like God, she was neglected.”

“She was his soulmate, as much a part of him as the very flesh and bone that made him. She was with him, in him, in everything he did. She was everything he wanted from his life, the very measure of his dreams.”

“He finally understood that God's presence was everywhere, at all times, and was experienced by everyone at one time or another.”

“He realized that Florentine personified this kind of wretched life against which his whole being was in revolt. And in the same moment he understood the feeling that drew him toward her: she was his own poverty, his solitude, his sad childhood, his lonely youth. She was all that he had hated, all that he had left behind him, but also everything that remained intimately linked to him, the most profound part of his nature and the powerful spur of his destiny.”

“The function of a child is to live his/her own life, not the life that his/her anxious parents think he/she should live, nor a life according to the purpose of the educators who thinks they knows best”

“She is no longer a person in his life; instead, she is a person that other people will remind him of.”

“His retreat into himself is not a final renunciation of the world, but a search for quietude, where alone it is possible for him to make his contribution to the life of the community.”

“Isn't life,' she stammered, 'isn't life--' But what life was she couldn't explain. No matter. He quite understood.

'Isn't it, darling?' said Laurie.”