You can’t know, sweetie, because you’ve never had a baby become a brilliant young reader with a side interest in horrible television shows, but the joy you bring us is so much greater than the sadness we feel about your illness.

Grief doesn't change you. It reveals you.

I don't know why boys expect us to like boy movies. We don't expect them to like girl movies.

I knew that time would now pass for me differently than it would for him - that I, like everyone in that room, would go on accumulating loves and losses while he would not. And for me, that was the final and truly unbearable tragedy: Like all the innumerable dead, he'd once and for all been demoted from haunted to haunter.

And in my classes, I will talk most of the time, and you will listen most of the time. Because you may be smart, but I've been smart longer.

If I could do it all over again," he said, his speech slow and vaguely mangled by his massive lower lip, "I'd just let myself be trampled to death by the Satan Pig.

Peter Van Houten was the only person I’d ever come across who seemed to (a) understand what it’s like to be dying, and (b) not have died.