An average of seventy-four species become extinct every day, which was one good reason but not the only one to hold someone's hand.

Sometimes, waking early before the others, wandering the rooms wrapped in a blanket or drinking my tea in the empty kitchen, I had that most rare of feelings, the sense that the world, so consistently overwhelming and incomprehensible, in fact has an order, oblique as it may seem, and I a place within it.

...after all, who isn't a survivor from the wreck of childhood?

The malpractice for advice-giving is like five times as much as a craniotomy.

He held my hand and told me a story about when he was six and threw a rock at a kid's head who was bullying his brother, and how after that no one had bothered either of them again. 'You have to stick up for yourself,' he told me. 'But it's bad to throw rocks,' I said. 'I know. You're smarter than me. You'll find something better than rocks.

Every year, the memories I have of my father become more faint, unclear, and distant. once they were vivid and true, then they became like photographs, and now they are more like photographs of photographs.

Later - when things happened that they could never have imagined - she wrote him a letter that said: When will you learn that there isn't a word for everything