Sell my old clothes - I'm off to heaven

We will often do anything to pretend that nothing is on our minds.

And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it's my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you.

Among adults – and among orphans – Wilbur Larch noted that delirious happiness was rare.

People are either attracted to the unseemly or disapproving of it, or both; yet we try to sound superior to the unseemly by pretending to be amused by it or indifferent to it.

If you feel strongly about people having abortions, don't have one.

...I suddenly realized what small towns are. They are places where you grow up with the peculiar-you live next door to the strange and the unlikely for so long that everything and everyone become commonplace.