“Never cry over anything that can't cry over you”
“This is the most complicated relationship since Romeo and Juliet," she complained. "You're
both hopeless. I mean, what is the big problem? You love him. He adores you. You get together and live happily ever after. Any
questions? No, of course not. That'll be ten dollars, thank you.”
“Life’s about a hell of a lot more than being happy. It’s about feeling the full range of stuff: happiness, sadness, anger, grief, love, hate. If you try to shut one of those off, you shut them all off. I don’t want to be happy. I know I won’t live happily ever after. I want more than that, something richer. I want to go right up close to the beauty and the ugliness. I want to see it all, know it all, understand it all. The richness and the poverty, the joy and the cruelty, the sweetness and the sadness.…That’s the best way I can lead a life I can be proud to call my own.”
“I knew then the answer to my question; the question I’d asked myself many times during this war, and many more times since it ended. When would I be able to put the war behind me? When would I be able to forget it? And I knew now that the answer was simple.
Never. I never would. Some things end. But war never does.”
“It struck me that Lee was in many ways our true hero. Lee was the one who did the dirtiest jobs, quietly, without fuss, without going into big emotional scenes. He was so efficient, so reliable, so brave. Whenever we fell short, he made up the gap. I'm not just talking about the red hot moments, when enemy soldiers were shooting at us, when we were within a moment of death. I'm talking about the sourer times too, when we were so tired we could hardly remember to breathe, or we were so bored we'd pick at each other just for something to do, or so distressed we'd wish a soldier would come along and blow us into oblivion with an M16. At all those times Lee stood strong. He was like the Wirrawee grain silo. You could see the grain silo from miles away, tall and reliable. It stood for Wirrawee, and it gave you a safe comforting feeling to know it was there. That was how I'd felt about Lee during the war.”
“Few people, very few, have a treasure, and if you do you must hang on to it. You must not let yourself be waylaid, and have it taken from you.”
“I wanted her for what she was, but when I got her I wanted her to change.”
“That the door fell shut, that the latch fell into place, did I know it with a nameless fear. At that second the eight days turned into 192 hours, empty caged hours.”
“It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms nearly always shoot themselves in...the head. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.”
“Is this your car?” I raised an eyebrow at him.
“No. I thought I’d steal one and drive it into town. Think
anyone will notice?” Graham reached across to unlock the passenger’s-
side door, then pushed it open. “You wouldn’t know
how to hotwire by any chance?”
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