“Prideful fool. It hurt his feelings that he couldnt make my crazy go away. You know how men are. Always trying to fix things cant be fixed.”

“In Louisiana, one of the first stages of grief is eating your weight in Popeyes fried chicken. The second stage is doing the same with boudin. People have been known to swap the order. Or to do bot...”

“I climbed aboard a Greyhound bus and rode it to New York without telling anyone, without so much as a goodbye. What was I thinking? I wasnt. I was young and stupid and broken. I knew from watching ...”

“Pork and chicken grease, the aromatics of choice for the Cajun.”

“Marriage must fight constantly against a monster which devours everything: routine.”

“I know that the whole pointthe only pointis tofind the things that matter, and hold on to them, and fight for them, and refuse tolet them go.”

“No one lived forever. But you fought for every minute you could get. Bought a little more with a lot of hard work.”

“Ive been fighting to be who I am all my life. Whats the point of being who I am, if I cant have the person who was worth all the fighting for?”

“Nobody can hurt me without my permission.”

“We got a fightin' side a mile wide, but we pray for peace 'cause it's mostly us that end up servin' overseas.”

“The seeking of a mate shall be undertaken with due preparation and care. A life-bond should never be contemplated as a light thing--unlike a legal union or sanctified joining, the sealing of souls ...”

“I dont have cookie-cutter relationships, Rumi. Women arent iPhone apps that I download and discard!”

“In advising the heads of state to learn from tragedy rather than perpetuate its existence Robert Kennedy excalimed, "Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom, not a guide by which to live." ...”