“There is only one you for all time. Fearlessly be yourself.”

“On the flight over to Chicago, I thought of a story Mom had once told me from her days as a pediatric nurse. "There was this little boy I was taking care of," she said "and he was terminally ill,and we all knew it,but he kept hanging on and hanging on. He wouldn't die, it was so sad.And his parents were always there with him,giving him so much love and support,but he was in so much pain,and it really was,time for him to go.So finally some of us nurses took his father aside and we told him, 'You have to tell your son it's okay for him to go. You have to give him permission.' And so the father took his son in his arms and he sat with him in a chair and held on to him and told him over and over, that it was okay for him to go,and,well,after a few moments,his son died.”

“It was my kind of song: fast and fun and exuberant,the lyrics tumbling out almost faster than my ears could follow them,some times rhyming,sometimes not. . .”

“Labels are for cans, not people.”

“Grief does not expire like a candle or the beacon on a lighthouse. It simply changes temperature.”

“We only have so much time, Mary,” I remember saying. “Time will kill you – it really will.”

“Man, that’s the only kind of book I like – one that’s so real you want to find out everything there is to know about the person who wrote it, like how tall he is and what kind of music he likes and whether or not he really went through all the stuff he was writing about.”