“The thing you had had and loved and taken for granted caught up with you all at once and for no sensible reason suddenly cost more than you could afford.”

“Love always costs more than you can afford to pay," he said. "And it's always worth the price.”

“Tired, yes, but it was more than that. Watching everything unfold had lurched me from anger to disgust and finally sorrow, had reminded me that love is fleeting and precious and should never be taken for granted. All of a sudden I felt the need to seize it with both hands, to assure myself that the same pain wouldn’t be mine.”

“But now the world, he thought, had taken them. He knew that this could suddenly happen. One day you just woke up, and there was somewhere that you needed to be.”

“perhaps I possess a certain Midwestern sensibility that I inherited from my mother and her parents, a sensibility that Warren Buffet seems to share: that at a certain point one has enough, that you can derive as much pleasure from a Picasso hanging in a museum as from one that's hanging in your den, that you can get an awfully good meal in a restaurant for less than twenty dollars, and that once your drapes cost more than the average American's yearly salary, then you can afford to pay a bit more in taxes.”

“You could not turn off love- even the rather absent, sometimes taken for granted love- the way you'd turn off a faucet. Love ran from the heart and the heart had it's own imperatives”