Even death after a long illness is without warning. The moment you had prepared for so carefully took you by storm. The troops broke through the window and snatched the body and the body is gone. ... Death reduces us to the baffled logic of a small child. If yesterday why not today?

Memoir ... satisfies our need for gossip and intimacy, for testimony and confessional, and in this world of spin, offers a truthful account of what it means to succeed or fail, to love and lose, to break your heart and mend it again.

It doesn't have to be like that but mostly it is.

Whether you want to call it God or the mystery of the cosmos doesn't matter to me.

I used to think marriage was a plate-glass window just begging for a brick.

I like to look at how people work together when they are put into stressful situations, when life stops being cozy.

The fact is that every atom that we're made of is part of that first explosion of a nuclear star billions of years ago. We're connected to the entire universe.