“There's no reason to hold yourself back and say you can't do something in life unless you go for it and try to do it.”

“Forever and ever, kid, until you're sick and tired of seeing me.”

“Falling into ruin was a bit like falling in love: Both descents stripped you bare and left you as you were at your core. And both endings are equally painful.”

“Never hold resentments for the person who tells you what you need to hear; count them among your truest, most caring, and valuable friends.”

“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.”

“In a universe where all life is in movement, where ever fact seen in perspective is totally engaging, we impose stillness on lively young bodies, distort reality to dullness, make action drudgery. ...”

“If only she could be so oblivious again, to feel such love without knowing it, mistaking it for laughter. ”

“When you're a kid all you know is that your dad puts on his suit or overalls and vanishes from your life until nightfall. Sometimes my pops came back exhausted and scarlet-eyed, as if he'd been eng...”