“We bring champagne to Franklin and Jeffrey, and I offer a final toast, 'Wishing you all good things in your life together.' Short, simple, to the point. I look at Meredith, relaxed in her ivory gow...”

“Jenny and I once talked about how we manage to live despite the knowledge that we are all going to die. What's the point of it all? Why bother getting up in the morning when faced with such futilit...”

“Cal opens a drawer, pulls out a sketch pad and charcoal and sets them down on a drafting table.'Let's draw.'I smile the way I did as a child when receiving a fresh box of 64 Crayola crayons, unabas...”

“The sun rises with a surprising intensity, a sign that June Gloom has cleared the runway and July is on approach. We are both tired, and it would've been to return to our bed after our morning walk...”

“What do you think of when you think of mourning?' Jenny asks.The question snaps me back to attention. I answer without really thinking. "I guess 'Funeral Blues' by W.H. Auden. I think it was Auden....”

“Dogs are always good and full of selfless love. They are undiluted vessels of joy who never, ever deserve anything bad that happens to them.”

“Problem is, though, sooner or later, physical pain, it's... it's manageable. See, real pain is emotional pain. That is the kind of pain that lasts.”

“Admitting pain humbles us to the reality of our personal histories and our present conditions. We no longer have to pretend we are something that we are not.”

“The world laughed at any attempts we made to exist in it without pain.”

“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.”