If you want to be a good writer, make sure you read. I'm amazed by how many people don't bother to do that.

...fairness," he said, "does not govern life and death. if it did, no good person would ever die." "Strangers," the Blue Man said, "are just family you have yet to come to know." "sacrifice is a part of life. it is supposed to be. it's not something to regret. it's something to aspire to. little sacrifices. big sacrifices. a mother works so her son can go to school. a daughter moves home to take care of her sick father. Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you're not really losing it. you're just passing it on to someone else.

She was like a wound beneath an old bandage, and he had grown more used to the bandage.

Detachment doesn’t mean you don’t let the experience penetrate you. On the contrary, you let it penetrate you fully. That’s how you are able to leave it.

And in that line now was a whiskered old man, with a linen cap and a crooked nose, who waited in a place called the Stardust Band Shell to share his part of the secret of heaven: that each affects the other and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one.

What in life can love not penetrate?

All who are born are always dying.