110 Quotes by Peter Hedges

In a cement park across the street is this giant sculpture. It is a giant umbrella frame lying on its side. It's green. Stand under it, during a rainstorm, you'll still get wet - that's why it's art.

I stared at her - unable to accept that at one time I was growing inside her. I was once just a couple of cells. My father and my mother were naked something had to be satisfactory about it, because he came inside her and she got pregnant. She, like me, was once a baby in her mother's stomach and so on and so forth and so it goes. So it goes.

In the living room, the consensus among the guests was that Scotty’s looks favored his father, but the Judge was quick to disagree: ‘He doesn’t look a thing like me. He looks like an hors d'oeuvre.’Hearing this, Joan thought the following, and pledged it to herself, as both prayer and promise: You will be loved, Scotty Ocean.And while the guests laughed at the Judge’s remark, Joan leaned over and softly whispered to her newborn son, 'You will be loved.

Who's calling?""Don't insult me like that," the voice says.I stop. Was I just insulting?

I never want to regret. 'Regret' is the ugliest word.

I was seven when he hung himself, and I don't remember all that much, and anything I did remember, I've managed to forget.

Gilbert?"Some days I hate all those who know my name.

It's supposed to go bing-bing or bong-bong or ding-ding when tires go over it. The one at Dave's stopped working several years ago, and he won't have it fixed because he feels as I do - that none of us need to be reminded we exist.

Wait a minute, I'm thinking, was this another one of those conversations where what is meant and what is being said are not the same thing?