Nothing haunts us like the things we don't say.

Money is not a substitute for tenderness, and power is not a substitute for tenderness.

Death doesn't just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed.

The story of my recent life.' I like that phrase. It makes more sense than 'the story of my life', because we get so many lives between birth and death. A life to be a child. A life to come of age. A life to wander, to settle, to fall in love, to parent, to test our promise, to realize our mortality- and in some lucky cases, to do something after that realization.

You've lived through a lot of wars, I said. "Yes." Do they ever make more sense? "No.

In college, I had a course in Latin, and one day the word "divorce" came up. I always figured it came from some root that meant "divide." In truth, it comes from "divertere," which means "to divert." I believe that. All divorce does is divert you, taking you away from everything you thought you knew and everything you thought you wanted and steering you into all kinds of other stuff, like discussions about your mother's girdle and whether she should marry someone else.

When you look into your mother’s eyes, you know that is the purest love you can find on this earth.