This is unbearable ... God. These books she'll never read. Her Life's Library.

The idea is that for ten minutes, we forget that we have feelings. And we forget about protecting ourselves or other people and we just say the truth. For ten minutes. And then we can go back to being lame.

I'm a grenade and at some point I'm going to blow up and I would like to minimize the casualties, okay?

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.

Because you're my friend, wingnut.

That was the worst part about having cancer, sometimes: The physical evidence of disease separates you from other people.

The nature of the love between a parent and child really is literally stronger than death. As long as either person in that relationship is alive, that relationship is still alive.