I hope you're not smoking in front of her, ' Lucia says to him.'Yeah, I lie in bed and puff in her face, Lucia, ' he says, irritated.

I wish everyone would stop crying, Tom. Uncle Joe would be so angry about it." But she's crying herself now. "He'd be so angry at us, Tom, for crying so much when all he did was laugh.

She knows that feeling too. Of believing that each time someone says her name, it’s to tell her that something bad has happened.

He knows bad days. Bad days take him completely by surprise. They make him not trust the good days because it's likely something is lurking twenty-four hours away.

It still amazes him how they could have been misled by her personality in Year Eleven. It's what depression does to a person, it changes them completely.

Tom always did anger well. Hid it well, but showed it even better

Just say up on the hill is the meaning of life and someone knew it and they wanted everyone else to enjoy it. So they put a red vinyl sofa up there.

But grieving people are selfish. They won’t let you comfort them and they say you don’t understand and they make you feel useless when all your life you’ve been functional to them.

They always prided themselves on looking youthful. “Forty’s the new thirty, ” they’d joke.Until heartbreak and grief enter your life, and then forty’s the new one hundred.

Does it help?” he asks. “The e-mailing.”She nods. “A tiny bit. It’s strange. You’re writing a letter to someone who’s never going to read it, so it kind of frees you up a bit.

Even five minutes of your time can make someone’s day,

The thing stank of unnamed yearnings, unfulfilled wishes, and a hunger so deep it make her feel hollow inside.

War is sweet to those who have not experienced it.

If all you do is think about what you need, you’re no better than an animal in the woods, and no smarter either. To be human, you’ve got to want. It makes you smarter and stronger.

You just have to keep getting out of your own way so that whatever it is that wants to be written can use you to write it.

I never had a particularly strong craving to procreate, except for earlier fantasies of wanting to be Marmee in Little Women.

Men at an earlier age, get the feminine aspects of them wrung out in a variety of ways.

[Ronald] Reagan talked to people across the world and he was very successful in communicating and treating people with dignity and respect, but putting America first in every single we do.

You do what you do best, try to stop guys like me

First and foremost, The Quiet Invasion is a first contact story. What would we do if we actually found evidence of alien life out there? It's also about politics.

Every thing that grows / Holds in perfection but a little moment.