"While we watched without comprehension, she moved away to where none of us wanted to follow. Ruth May shrank back through the narrow passage between this brief fabric of light and all the rest of what there is for us: the long waiting. Now she will wait the rest of the time. It will be exactly as long as the time that passed before she was born."

"One of the pleasant duties of America's most famous announcers during the relatively short swing era of the big bands was to host late-night remotes from some of the most famous ballrooms throughout the country."

"...Required for good fiction: character, conflict, change through time. And if you're really blessed, you get resolution. But life doesn't usually work out that way."

"Coincidentally, a good age for a Japanese girl is younger than twenty five, because that's when she turns into a 'Christmas Cake'. Christmas cakes, as everyone knows, are desirable before the twenty fifth but afterward quickly become stale and are put on the shelf."

"Like officer Dave.He's never said much about his life, but I can tell he's scarred. And he knows I'm scarred too. The wounded always recognize the wounded. We can smell each other."

"There is a saying that when someone is struck down without warning that he 'didn't know what hit him.' It's a bit of a copout, providing the excuse that what happened wasn't the individual's fault at all. That it couldn't have been avoided and no one is to blame.Frankly, that's just a bunch of hokey horseshit."

"To some degree we all live with uncertainty. We have no control over the future. Yet we carry on, we persevere, because, I guess, it's the way we're made."

"I know you think that we saved you or something, Jeremy,' he said. 'That we were stronger than you. But we're not. We weren't. We're all just trying to survive however we can."