If you are very lucky, you're allowed to be in certain places during just the right season of your life: by the sea for the summer when you're seven or eight and full of the absolute need to swim until dark and exhaustion close their hands together, cupping you in between.

The future is fastidious and punctual. It keeps perfect time and arrives everywhere on the dot. In contrast, its slacker brother the past has no use for clocks or appointments. It comes and goes as it pleases in our memory, camping out wherever the hell it damn well wants to in there. Untrustworthy, prone to exaggeration, biased- you wouldn't lend it ten cents, but it *sure* can be charming and seductive when it feels like it.

Death doesn't make you sad- it makes you empty. That's what's so bad about it. All of your charms and beliefs and funny habits fall fast through a big black hole, and suddenly you know they're gone because just as suddenly, there's nothing left at all inside.

One of the saddest realities is that we never know when our lives are at their peak. Only after it is over and we have some kind of perspective do we realize how good we had it a day, a month, five years ago.

Reading a book, for me at least, is like traveling in someone else's world. If it's a good book, then you feel comfortable and yet anxious to see what's going to happen to you there, what'll be around the next corner. But if it's a lousy book, then it's like going through Secaucus, New Jersey -- it smells and you wish you weren't there, but since you've started the trip, you roll up the windows and breathe through your mouth until you're done.

Sometimes it is the smallest thing that saves us: the weather growing cold, a child's smile, and a cup of excellent coffee.

I would have given him everything. I would have pulled down planets to make our life work.