If your reading life and your friendships overlap, that's just a nice coincidence - a case where the conversation you're having with books and the conversation you're having with actual human beings happen to dovetail.

I had always been the kind of boy who was quick to laugh and quick to cry.

I was also ready to believe, though, that whatever good things I had managed to set upright could topple at any second.

...When you die, the energy that kept you alive filters into the people you loved. Did you know that? It's like a fire you've tended all your life, and the sparks are all scattered into the wind.... That's why we survive as long as we do, because the people who loved us keep us going.

She had the same responsibility as everybody else did: to live as softly as she could in the world.

You have a pet theory, one you have been turning over for years, that life itself is a kind of Rube Goldberg device, an extremely complicated machine designed to carry out the extremely simple task of constructing your soul.

Worry is a mean-faced dwarf who beats on your heart like a kettledrum.