The world is made by the people who show up for the job.

A good friend of my son's is a son to me.

All the worry people expend over not existing after they die, yet nary a one ever seems to spare a moment to worry about not having existed before they were conceived. Or at all. After all, one sperm over and we would have been our sisters, and we'd never have been missed.

I'd storm heaven for you, if I knew where it was.

You couldn't be that good and not know it, somewhere in your secret heart, however much you'd been abused into affecting public humility.

As the week wore on, Ivan contemplated the merits of inertia as a problem-solving technique with growing favor

I spent my 20s working in patient care at a large university hospital, an experience that has informed all my work and has given me a lot of human observation to draw on.