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"Sometimes you risk everything for a life worth living, even if you're not the one that'll be alive to see it." (p152)

Stealing a man’s wife, that’s nothing, but stealing his car, that’s larceny.

I loved her like a rabbit loves a rattlesnake.

She’d collected the dreams like bright beads on a string of nights that wound around her each day, every day until this one. (p173)

Love, when you get fear in it, it’s not love any more. It’s hate.

That’s all it takes, one drop of fear, to curdle love into hate.

I make no conscious effort to be tough, or , or grim, or any of the things I am usually called. I merely try to write as the character would write, and I never forget that the average man, from the fields, the streets, the bars, the offices, and even the gutters of his country, has acquired a vividness of speech that goes beyond anything I could invent, and that if I stick to this heritage, this of the American countryside, I shall attain a maximum of effectiveness with very little effort.

We go to the schools and they leach the dreams from where our ancestors hid them, in the honeycombs of slushy marrow buried in our bones. And us? Well, we join our ancestors, hoping we left enough dreams behind for the next generation to stumble across. (p90)

"...When we heal our land, we are healed also." (p193)

And maybe that is the true reason for this journey, by shedding all the ballast of the familiar life they are each trying to recapture a sensation of weightlessness they remember but perhaps never lived, in memory more than anywhere else traveling is like free-fall, or flight.

I remember this star, though. Maybe it’s not even a real memory, but this star makes me feel safe, like my mom and dad are nearby. I used to actually talk to the star, which seems really childish to me now. Still, feeling like my parents are close makes it easier to make big decisions.

In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were.