“Let me tell ya. You gotta pay attention to signs. When life reaches out with a moment like this it's a sin if you don't reach back... I'm telling you.”

“And I still love you in my own fucked-up way. I miss you, I really do. Can we still be friends?”

“Life is not a PG feel-good movie. Real life often ends badly. Literature tries to document this reality, while showing us it is still possible for us to endure nobly.”

“Sounds like the start of a beautiful friendship, Leonard. It really does. Heres looking at you, kid.”

“Air goes in and outof my nose, throat, lungs, blood, heartbrain - and so I am”

“Although once when we were talking after class, Herr Silverman told me that when someone rises up and holds himself to a higher standard, even when doing so benefits others, average people resent i...”

“A hallmark of virtuous adulthood is learning to find freedom in your work rather than freedom from your work, even when work might hurt.”

“Parenting requires a delicate balance of letting your child be your spiritual teacher while you maintain the clarity and boundaries to be her Earthly teacher.”

“Remember, nothing is ever created or destroyed. Therefore, unresolved emotional pain from childhood does not dissolve by itself. It sits waiting to be declared, and a child is the ultimate vehicle ...”

“I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,I see my father strolling outunder the ochre sandstone arch, thered tiles glinting like bentplates of blood behind his head, Isee my mother...”

“We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in...”

“Id never heard my parents make love. If they made love, they did it silently, like bank robbers, like surgeons.”