...in the eyes of her oldest friends and colleagues and extended family, she wasn't a painfully thin seventy-five-year-old gray haired woman dying of cancer- she was a grade school class president, the young friend you gossiped with, a date or double date, someone to share a tent with in Darfur, a fellow election monitor in Bosnia, a mentor, a teacher you'd laughed within a classroom or a faculty lounge, or the board member you'd groaned with after a contentious meeting

Evil almost always starts with small cruelties.

I was learning that when you're with someone who is dying, you may need to celebrate the past, live the present, and mourn the future all at the same time.

We all owe everyone for everything that happens in our lives. But it's not owing like a debt to one person--it's really that we owe everyone for everything. Our whole lives can change in an instant--so each person that keeps that from happening, no matter how small a role they play, is also responsible for all of it. Just by giving friendship and love, you keep the people around you from giving up--and each expression of friendship or love may be the one that makes all the difference.

If our family was an airline, Mom was the hub and we were the spokes. You rarely went anywhere nonstop; you went via Mom, who directed the traffic flow and determined the priorities: which family member was cleared for takeoff or landing. Even my father was not immune to Mom's scheduling, though he was given more leeway than the rest of us.

That’s one of the things books do. They help us talk. But they also give us something we all can talk about when we don’t want to talk about ourselves.

It's not hard to read about death abstractly. I do find it tough when a character I love dies, of course. You can truly miss characters. Not like you miss people, but you can still miss them.