“The only thing you have to do in this life is die," said Mrs. Pinsky..."everything else is a choice.”

“But the past is long, and the future is short.”

“We were like wanderers in a desert, blessed with a rare downpour, but unable to store the rain.”

“It requires a certain kind of bravery, I suppose, to choose the status quo. There's a certain boldness to inaction.”

“I could no longer remember the way my mother's eyes looked before the slowing. Had they always been so red around the edges? Surely, those pockets of gray beneath her lower lashes were new. She sti...”

“He'd grown eager to hand off his things, as if the weight of his possessions kept him tethered to this earth, and by giving them away, he could snip those strings.”

“Being a dad is quite rewarding and even magical at times. It is our greatest chance to do something right in our lives that will keep making the world a brighter place even generations after we are...”

“I always wondered why God was supposed to be a father," she whispers. Fathers always want you to measure up to something. Mothers are the ones who love you unconditionally, don't you think?”

“Sigmund Freud, the father of psychiatry and an atheist, theorized that ones attitude toward ones father largely shaped ones attitude toward God.”

“There are many things that make a man irritable when he arrives home from work in the evening and a sensible wife will usually notice the storm-signals and will leave him alone until he simmers down.”

“Oblivion, she thought. That was the world she lived in. It was what they should name some countries, towns, and places.”

“A lot of men wouldn't like being called a romantic. It's not macho enough.'Quite often men are fools.”