Especially when you're faced with hard times, you need to remember that life is either tragedy or comedy. For me, that's what the magic is. Life has remarkable, surprising moments that get you through the hard times.

You can't have real pain without real love. You can't feel grief and loss and hurt without real love. Love is the only way you can ever be really hurt deep down.

About chocolate: "This is what laughing tastes like.

Battles that involve oatmeal are just never going to end up being historic, you know?" Jake went on. "Gettysburg? No major oatmeal involvement. The Battle of Midway? Neither side used oatmeal. Desert Storm? No oatmeal.

They think I'm too old to cause trouble. Old age is a powerful disguise.

I like colorful tales with black beginnings and stormy middles and cloudless blue-sky endings. But any story will do.

What's love? Something that lasts a week or a month and that's all you can except? Or is it just that some loves have a short shelf life? You know, like yogurt: after a week or two they go bad. And how do you recognize the other kind of love, the kind that isn't like yogurt? The kind that's more like... I don't know, like peanut butter, that lasts forever and always tastes good?