Remember, the worst hour of your life only lasts for sixty minutes. (292)

Love and pain are not the same. But sometimes it feels like they should be. Love is put to test everyday. Pain is not. Yet the two of them are inseparable because true love cannot bear separation.

One of the strange things about friendship is that time together isn't cancelled out by time apart. One doesn't erase the other or balance it on some invisible scale. You can spend a few hours with someone and they will change your life, or you can spend a lifetime with a person and remain unchanged.

People who lose children have their hearts warped into weird shapes. Some try to deny it has happened. Some pretend it hasn't. Losing friends or parents is not the same. To lose a child is beyond comprehension. It defies biology. It contradicts the natural order of history and genealogy. It derails common sense. It violates time. It creates a huge, black, bottomless hole that swallows all hope.

Why do our parents have the ability to make us feel like children even when our hair is graying and we have a mortgage that feels like a Third World debt? (135)

I don't know what else to tell you. I often think how different my life would have been - how much happier - if you'd been a part of it. One day.

Sometimes friends do foolish things. My father told me that true friends are like gold coins. Ships are wrecked by storms and lie for hundreds of years on the ocean floor. Worms destroy the wood. Iron corrodes. Silver turns black but gold doesn't change in sea water. It loses none of its brilliance or colour. It comes up the same. It survives shipwrecks and time.