- [last lines]
- Nathan Zuckerman: [narrating funeral] You come at people with an open mind, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You get them wrong while you're with them, or you tell someone about them and get them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive. We are wrong. About the Swede, how life was going to open its arms and shower blessings upon him, I was never more wrong about anyone in my life.
- Swede Levov: You were involved in something there, something political.
- Merry Levov: Everything is political. Brushing your teeth is political.
- Merry Levov: Daddy, how much suffering do you want?
- Swede Levov: Who are you? Where is my daughter? My daughter did not kill four people. Say it isn't you. Say it isn't you!
- Penny Hamlin: I don't blame you, Mr Levov. I don't blame either one of you. You didn't go out and buy the dynamite and make the bomb. You didn't plant the bomb. I feel badly for you both. The two of you... are as much victims of this tragedy as we are. I lost a husband. My kids lost a father. But the difference is that for us... we will survive as a family, a loving family. We will survive with our memories intact and our memories to sustain us. We are the same family we were when Russ was here and we will survive. That's the difference.
- [first lines]
- Nathan Zuckerman: [narrating as WWII era dance music plays] Let's remember the energy. America had won the war. The depression was over. Sacrifice was over. The upsurge of life was contagious. We celebrated a moment of collective inebriation that we would never know again. Nothing like it in all the years that followed from our childhood until tonight, the 45th reunion of our high school class.
- Nathan Zuckerman: [now walking down a school hallway] At 30 or 40, a gathering of my old classmates would have been exactly the kind of thing I'd have kept my nose out of. But at 62, I found myself drawn to it as if in the crowd of half-remembered faces I'd be closer to the mystery at the heart of things, a magic trick that turned time past into time present.