“The world would be a boring place if we were all the same.”

“You’re not making a whole lot of sense.”“I am in my head,” I mutter. What does he need me to do here? Stand up on the table and yell, “Hello! Hot guy! I’m into you!”

“Twenty years after we had left so fierce and proud, we were all right back where we had started, yoked to each other and the same old drama.”

“My heart broke all over again. I wanted my life back, my mama, but I knew I would never have that. The child I had been was gone with the child she had been. We were new people, and we didn't know each other anymore. I shook my head desperately.”

“There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto—God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger.... A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.”

“In death, we are not defined by what we did or who we were but by what we meant to others. How well we loved and were loved in return.”

“I squinted at the clock, sighing when I realized it was only 7 A.M. "Christ. Do you think the powers that be would mind if I asked them to make sure the next apocalypse takes place later in the day? Maybe around teatime?""Good luck with that.”