"I have been afraid of putting air in a tire ever since I saw a tractor tire blow up and throw Newt Hardbine's father over the top of the Standard Oil sign. I'm not lying. He got stuck up there. About nineteen people congregated during the time it took for Norman Strick to walk up to the Courthouse and blow the whistle for the volunteer fire department. They eventually did come with the ladder and haul him down, and he wasn't dead but lost his hearing and in many other ways was never the same afterward. They said he overfilled the tire."

“It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn't.”

“I also thank Bill McKibben and his 350.org colleagues for the most important work in the world, and the most unending.”

“Even the most recalcitrant climate scientists agree now, the place is heating up. pretty much every one of the lot. Unless some other outcome is written on the subject line of his paycheck. If you were here to get information, Tina, you would not be standing in my laboratory telling me what scientists think.”

“Cub retreated to the familiar grounds of remorse and insufficiency, the terms of his existence, ratified by marriage. He could construct defeat from any available material and live inside it, but for once Dellarobia didn't go there with him. she was going ahead.”

“We're animals. We're born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.”

“A flock is nothing but the put-together of all your past choices.”