“Life is made up of desires that seem big and vital one minute, and little and absurd the next. I guess we get what's best for us in the end.”

“It ain't no use putting up your umbrella till it rains!”

“I always feel....the movement is a sort of mosaic. Each of us puts in one little stone, and then you get a great mosaic at the end.”

“I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures.”

“Maybe a hundred years ago our people should have run away from this place, I said... And then run from the next place and the next place and the place after that? You run once, what makes you think you won't have to run all the rest of your life?... We love moment to moment... Everything changes. One minute we are part of the river, and the next we are joined with the sea.”

“It's taken years for me to understand that dying doesn't end the story; it transforms it. Edits, rewrites, the blur, aand epiphany of one-way dialogue. Most of us wander in and out of one another's lives until not death, but distance, does us part-- time and space and heart's weariness are the blander executioners or human connection.”

“Near the end I asked him one night in the hospital corridor what he thought was happening, and he said, "Tell her everything you haven't said," and I smiled with relief. "There's nothing," I said. "I've already told her everything.”