“Someday, I'm going to have to break some of your rules, Mom.""I know," she said. "Try to do it behind my back, will you?¨You can bet on that, Mom.¨We both sat there and laughed.”

“I mean, when do we start feeling like the world belongs to us?I wanted to tell him that the world would never belong to us. 'I don't know', I said. 'Tomorrow.”

“Healthy people have healthy boundaries. Unhealthy people, well, let’s not get into that. It’s like this: some people have walls which means they let no one in. This equals unhealthy. Some people le...”

“I wanted to tell her happy was hard for me. But I think she already knew that.”

“Feeling sorry for myself was an art.”

“I always thought of men as being hard—maybe because I was hard. But there was a softness in Tom that betrayed his large masculine hands and his deep baritone voice. He knew something about love tha...”

“She was bendable light: she shone around every corner of my day.”

“Over the summit, I saw the so-called Mono desert lying dreamily silent in the thick, purple light -- a desert of heavy sun-glare beheld from a desert of ice-burnished granite.”

“Love is a weapon of Light, and it has the power to eradicate all forms of darkness. That is the key. When we offer love even to our enemies, we destroy their darkness and hatred...”

“They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked high...”

“The world seemed to shimmer a little at the edges.”

“If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and...”