“Call to mind a person you've lost that you will miss to the end of your days,and then imagine happening upon that person out in public. . . . You wouldn't question your sanity, because you couldn't bear to think this wasn't real. And you certainly wouldn't demand explanations, or alert anybody nearby, or reach out to touch this person, not even if you'd been feeling that one touch was worth giving everything up for. You would hold your breath. You would keep as still as possible. You would will your loved one not to go away again.”

“Let's say you had to report back to heaven at the end of your time on earth, tell them what your personal allotment of experience had been: wouldn't it sound like Poppy's speech? The smell of radiator dust on a winter morning, the taste of hot maple syrup ...”

“People imagine that missing a loved one works kind of like missing cigarettes,' he said. 'The first day is really hard but the next day is less hard and so forth, easier and easier the longer you go on. But instead it's like missing water. Every day, you notice the person's absence more.”

“There is no true life. Your true life is the one you end up with, whatever it may be. You just do the best you can with what you've got.”

“That was one of the worst things about losing your wife, I found: your wife is the very person you want to discuss it all with.”

“Epictetus say that everything has two handles, one by which it can be borne and one which it cannot. If your brother sins against you, he says, don't take hold of it by the wrong he did you but by the fact that he's your brother. That's how it can be borne.”

“Everything,' his father said, 'comes down to time in the end--to the passing of time, to changing. Ever thought of that? Anything that makes you happy or sad, isn't it all based on minutes going by? Isn't sadness wishing time back again? Even big things--even mourning a death: aren't you really just wishing to have the time back when that person was alive? Or photos--ever notice old photographs? How wistful they make you feel? ... Isn't it just that time for once is stopped that makes you wistful? If only you could turn it back again, you think. If only you could change this or that, undo what you have done, if only you could roll the minutes the other way, for once.”