“A shaft of sunlight at the end of a dark afternoon, a note of music, and the way the back of a baby’s neck smells if it’s mother keeps it tidy,” answered Henry.
“Correct,” said Stuart. “Those are the important things. You forgot one thing, though. Mary Bendix, what did Henry Rackmeyer forget?”
“He forgot ice cream with chocolate sauce on it,” said Mary quickly.”
“Well,” said Stuart, “a misspelled word is an abomination in the sight of everyone.”
“Stuart rose from the ditch, climbed into his car, and started up the road that led toward the north...As he peeked ahead into the great land that stretched before him, the way seemed long. But the sky was bright, and he somehow felt he was headed in the right direction.”
“In the loveliest town of all where the houses were white and high and the elm trees were green and higher than the houses where the front yards were wide and pleasant and the back yards were bushy and worth finding out about, where the streets sloped down to the stream and the stream flowed quietly under the bridge, where the lawns ended in orchards and the orchards ended in fields and the fields ended in pastures and the pastures climbed the hill and disappeared over the top toward the wonderful wide sky, in this loveliest of all towns Stuart stopped to get a drink of sarsaparilla.”
“Swamps where cedars grow and turtles wait on logs but not for anything in particular; fields bordered by crooked fences broken by years of standing still; orchards so old they have forgotten where the farmhouse is. In the north I have eaten my lunch in pastures rank with ferns and junipers, all under fair skies with a wind blowing.”
“Very fine law,” said Stuart. “When I am Chairman, anybody who is mean to anybody else is going to catch it.”
“There’s something about north,” he said, “something that sets it apart from all other directions. A person who is heading north is not making any mistake, in my opinion.”
“That’s the way I look at it,” said Stuart. “I rather expect that from now on I shall be traveling north until the end of my days.”
“(Not every doctor can look into a mouse's ear without laughing)”
“He wiped his face with his handkerchief, for he was quite warm from the exertion of being Chairman of the World. It had taken more running and leaping and sliding than he had imagined.”
“Our course heavenward is like the plan of the zealous pilgrim of old, who for every three steps forward, took one backward.”
“Yet sometimes being a friend meant letting people do things that hurt, like putting distance between you, just because it made them happy.”
“It may not seem like much - a few kisses in the dark - but it was enough to burn a hole like an ulcer in my heart.”
“Embrace your inner lunatic. Fun times guaranteed.”
“When she absently worried her bottom lip with one of her adorable little fangs, he sighed.
The Enemy of Old fucking sighed.
Dear gods, it’d finally happened to him.
Happiness.
Then his own fangs sharpened.I will kill anyone who tries to take this feeling away from me.”
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