- Abner Beech: The way to a woman's heart, boy, ain't by rejecting your own kin and parroting the asinine opinions of her father.
- Jimmy: They say they're biting like anything down in the creek.
- Abner Beech: Well stick to your work and they won't bite you.
- [first lines]
- Warner Pitts: [narrating] The war between the states. That's what Abner Beech called it. It'd been going on for a year before it really got to us in the upper part of New York state. We were far from the battles. At least I thought we were. They called us people in the north that didn't want war copperheads. I was just an orphan living with the Beech's, but I was a bif a copperhead as Abner.
- Warner Pitts: Springtime, 1862. That's when the war came home. And nothing was ever the same again.