“Can I tell you something? It wasn't so bad. Not so bad at all right then, me scowling at the dirt, James in his bed, the way it always always was. Look, if that's all that happened, if his dying ju...”

“Here's what I think: when you're born, you're assigned a brain like you're assigned a desk, a nice desk, with plenty of pigeonholes and drawers and secret compartments. At the start, it's empty, an...”

“Whatever you have lost there are more of, just not yours.”

“Im so sorry, he said, because after Pamela died, he promised himself that if anyone told him the smallest, saddest story, he would answer, Im so sorry. Meaning, Yes, that happened. You couldn't bel...”

“All I can say is, it's a sort of kinship, as though there is a family tree of grief. On this branch, the lost children, on this the suicided parents, here the beloved mentally ill siblings. When so...”

“Grief lasts longer than sympathy, which is one of the tragedies of the grieving.”

“I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people-to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole, to see the cause and think it's the effect or vice versa”

“At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear.”

“I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.”

“In the age of technology there is constant access to vast amounts of information. The basket overflows; people get overwhelmed; the eye of the storm is not so much what goes on in the world, it is ...”

“God gave us the access, but we need to exercise courage to have it. No one lacks the access, but its only few that have the courage to grab it!”

“It is one of the unexpected disasters of the modern age that our new unparalleled access to information has come at the price of our capacity to concentrate on anything much. The deep, immersive th...”

“Take a glass of wine while reading, your feet on the back of your slave. This is the best combination of pleasures that is.”