"He bought a bird in its own cage, with a sheet over it so no one could see the bird and the bird couldn't see anyone, and the whole thing was a secret bird... Everything he said was tinged with the unreadability of someone who would bring a bird on cruise ship."

""Instead of change, please give me gun so i can shoot you." She is soft-spoken but short and full of rage lately, like her whole life."

"They are all one, the mothers of us all, like the money you spent. Imagine the vanish of weight if the advice of your mother never existed. They tell us things, unless we have no mothers and either way things turn out such that nothing you've ever heard is ever any help."

""I know" Helena said and this is another example of why behave this way? Things just poured out of her mouth lately, like vomit, and sometimes it actually was."

"If you follow the diamond in my mother's ring from Africa to Germany to California to Arizona to Wisconsin, in the heel of a grandmother, in the beak of a magpie, in the gravel of the path, in someone else's novel, in the center of the earth where the volcanoes are from, you would forget the miracle, the reason diamonds end up in people's fingers in the first place. it is not the diamonds or the birds, the people or the potatoes, it is not any of the nouns. The miracle is the adverbs, the way things are done. It is the way love gets done despite every catastrophe."

"Allison squinted at the strange, catastrophic sky, and took another step, another step, another step, because in the future - she could see it - this would not be happening."

"When I was crazy." the radio explained, "I thought you were great."

"He's been misled and he's been afraid. He's been hit in the head and left for dead. He's been abused and he's been accused and he's been refused a piece of bread. On and on he goes down this road getting pushed around and lost and around and given until sundown to get out of town, and yet this is basically a love song. He's had the shit kicked out of him, and guess what? It's love."

"South San Francisco The Industrial City is ugly as sin but somebody lives there: Allison, in fact."

"What he'd just said was "Who cares?" and nobody wants to hear that."

"Yeah, I have a question," said the guy with the wicked eyes... "My question is, I quit. I'm going to quit."

"Dear Joe The letter said The windows rattle without you, you bastard. The trees are the cause, rattling in the wind, you jerk, the wild scraping those leaves and twigs against my window. They'll keep on doing this, you terrible husband, and slowly wear away our entire apartment."

"It was the sort of day when people walk in the park and solve problems. "We'll simply call the taxi company, David, and request a large one, like one of those vans." Is the sort of thing you would overhear if you were overhearing in the park."

"Adam hates Tomas and tried to get Eddie to join him in hate. It hasn't worked, although Eddie will admit certain shortcomings, and the two men have not met until now, in the forest, when Adam has decided that Tomas in Eddie's stories and the Tomas in this story are the same man."

"All four of them have completely abandoned one another."

"That's always where the love goes, with somebody else away from me."

"[she] gave me a puzzled frown like she thought offhand i was dead but the media's so unreliable these days."

"I'm not - the terrific guy you keep telling me about. I'm not made of sugar and spice and everything nice. I'm made of rats and snails and puppy-dogs tails. I lie sometimes. I have broken people's hearts. I'm looking for love, I'll admit that, but now that it's here in abundance, I'm afraid of commitment and I want you, please, to leave me."

"I find you interesting, Joe, so nearly everything you say will be interesting too. I love you. I could say I'm lonely but that's not the only reason."

"This is love, and the trouble with it: it can make you embarrassed. Love is really liking someone a whole lot and not wanting to screw that up. Everybody's chewed over this. This unites us, this part of love."

"Love can smack you like a seagull, and pour all over your feet like junkmail. You can't be ready for such a thing any more than salt water taffy gets you ready for the ocean."

"All love gets over, and we must get over it."

"They could not love anymore, they thought, just drink and pour coffee and track people down in the rain. They were living frigidly, as if in a cone of frost."

"She said, "We're detectives" in the tone of voice that someone might say, "Making you happy isn't making me happy""

"The rain, the rain, the rain. You can't even hear it outside the window but still it's a sad thing. Rain, the grade school teachers say, makes the trees and flowers grow, but we're not trees and flower, and so many grade school teachers are single."

"It was a bad day for love."

"This was that day if you know what I mean."

"What a bad day it was, the clouds were low and cloudy, the rain no fun, and the dark as it hit the late afternoon thick like someone who stops by your place and just won't leave. The day was canceled, almost, on account of the rain spilling itself over everything."

"The right boys I always toss and the wrong ones I keep on top of me like paperweights."

"I'm full of hard times today"

"It's always dawnest before dark"

""I love you, too" David said and took the bottle. "I want you to love me in particular," Helena said"

"… the point is, why is there cruelty? Why do people ask other people to do impossible things? why behave this way? why is there mean, when there are better things than mean, love particularly?"

"This is love, moving to where the money is, and all the while a volcano or an ex-girlfriend might blow the whole thing to hell, as the Americans say. As everybody says."

"Money money money money money money money money money. Let no one say it has no place in a love story. It has a particular place. It is something on the right shelf."

"This world is suchier than we are, and the best thing to do is keep moving and find your keys."

"Keith has one of those all terrain things that will come in so handy when the world ends and we need a nine-thousand -cylinder engine to drive over those hordes of blood-thirsty mutants crawling all over the video-game landscape."

"Standing ten feet away from Lila was sort of kickass with her nails drumming on the box with the slot in, where we put everything that we rip in half, and with her blue-eyed beauty and with the gum she was chewing and how lovely she was, in that way that makes you want to find something else lovely just so you can give it to her and see how really kickass it is to have to lovely things next to each other."

"If i were a little braver i would have asked her something like, "Do you think Kickass: the movie is a comedy in the traditional, classical sense?" and we could have that conversation and it would lead to other conversations during the flat and lonely times."

"I'm frightened by your behaviour. I woke up this morning and you said good morning and i said good morning, what do you feel like doing today, and you said well i sort of have to do this thing, and i said what thing and you said go to the reading of my father's will, and I said what are you talking about and then you told me that your dad had died. THIS MORNING."

"The world gets grimy and the love object is in stark relief from its surroundings. This is love, a pretty thing on an ugly street and why wouldn't you pick it up if it appeared in a taxi cab."

"Love was in the air so both of us walked through love on our way to the corner."

"The story of the Baudelaires does not take place in a fictional land where lollipops grow on trees and singing mice do all of the chores. The story of the Baudelaires takes place in a very real world, where some people are laughed at just because they have something wrong with them, and where children can find themselves all alone in the world, struggling to understand the sinister mystery that surrounds them..."

"Miracles are like meatballs because nobody knows what they are made of, where they came from, or how often they should appear."

"One of the most troublesome things in life is that what you do or do not want has very little to do with what does or does not happen."

"It's hard for decent people to stay angry at someone who has burst into tears, which is why it is often a good idea to burst into tears if a decent person is yelling at you."

"The sad truth is that the truth is sad."

"For Beatrice— Our love broke my heart, and stopped yours."

"Because of the information discussed on page nine, experts now suspect that there may in fact be one survivor of the fire, but the survivor's whereabouts are unknown."