You learned that if you're tired enough, you can sleep sitting up. That the unendurable is perfectly endurable if you just take it a minute at a time, and when the alternative is no more minutes ever.

Can't is for pussies.

Children are the proof we've been here . . . they're where we go to when we die. They're the best thing and the most impossible thing, but there's nothing else . . . Life is a riddle and they are the answer. If there's any answer, it has to be them.

The software program for motherhood is impossible to fully download into the male brain. You give them two tasks and they're like, 'I have to change the baby and get the dry cleaning?'

No man would ever use both hands to hold a cup of tea, unless he was one day's march from the South Pole, with one chum dead in the snow, dogs all eaten and six fingers about to drop off. And even then he would look around the empty tent to check, in case anybody thought it was girly.

Death itself is too big to take in, she already sees that; the loss comes at you instead in an infinite number of small installments that can never be paid off.

In death, we are not defined by what we did or who we were but by what we meant to others. How well we loved and were loved in return.