“That's how you know you love someone, I guess, when you can't experience anything without wishing the other person were there to see it, too.”

“Why is it so hard to articulate love yet so easy to express disappointment?”

“You can't compare and rank heartache. Pain is pain is pain. There is no precise measurement. No quarter cup.”

“I'll never be ready. Yet at the same time, you always want to reach the end. You can't fly to a destination and linger in the air. I want to reach the end of this thing, and I feel terrible about it.”

“A sea of red lights, and I slow down. My job now is to gather everyone together and tell them we have to let her go. I won't tell anyone over the phone, because I didn't like hearing the news from ...”

“I think grief and fear are going to come to him suddenly. They'll be undiluted and words won't work. We're all going to get hit and won't know how to hit back. I wish I knew the answers, how to hel...”

“Each form is inadequate, like a graft to be rejected by its intractable and unrelenting host and thus can only serve a brief and momentary purpose coherent to a context rooted in contiguous reason....”

“Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,just once. And never again. But to have beenthis once, completely, even if only once:to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.”

“Judged against eternity, how little of what agitates us makes any difference.”

“For every inch of skin, there is memory. Devils are so made. Saints, too, if you believe in them. His humanity has been broken as an old walking stick that once held up a crippled man named Thomas....”

“It frightens me that I can't do anything sensible about it.""Are you scared that you'll wind up with a boring job where you have to see the same people every day and drink instant coffee?""I'm more...”

“She'd be dead before the memories and pain were finally gone; she knew it, accepted it, and dealt with it.”