Richard Ford

"Im not worried," I said. And I wasnt, because I thought things would be fine. And even though I was wrong, it is still not so bad a way to set your mind toward the unknown just when you are coming into the face of it."

"When you are sixteen you do not know what your parents know, or much of what they understand, and less of whats in their hearts. This can save you from becoming an adult too early, save your life from becoming only theirs lived over again - which is a loss. But to shield yourself - as I didnt do - seems to be an even greater error, since whats lost is the truth of your parents life and what you should think about it, and beyond that, how you should estimate the world you are about to live in."

"One day you think you never even made a choice and then you have to make one, even a wrong one, just so youre sure youre still able. And once thats over, you can go back and be happy again with what you were before you started worrying."

"People surprise you, Frank, with just how fuckin stupid they are. I mean, do you actually realize how much adult conversation is spent on this fuckin business? Facts treated like they were opinions just for the simple purpose of talking about it longer? Some people might think thats interesting, bub, but Ill tell you. Its romanticizing a goddamn rock by calling it a mountain range to me. People waste a helluva lot of time they could be putting to useful purposes. This is a game. See it and forget about it."

"Sometimes we do not really become adults until we suffer a good whacking loss, and our lives in a sense catch up with us and wash over us like a wave and everything goes."

"In the fall of 1960, when I was sixteen and my father was for a time not working, my mother met a man named Warren Miller and fell in love with him."

"And though they may both have felt that something had died between them, something they may not even have been aware or until it was gone and disappeared from their lives forever, they mustve felt - both of them - that there was something of themselves, something important, that could not live at all in any other way but by their being together, much as they had been before."

"I may be too cynical," Catherine says."

"Its probably nice to know your parents were once not your parents."

"You can get carried away with how things were once, and not how you need to make them better."