“Cancer will be like that, I tell Marla. There will be mistakes, and maybe the point is not to forget the rest of yourself if one little part might go bad.”

“Ah. Alicia, see? Didn't I tell you that's what she needed to begin with? Maybe a little schtupping and it would make the cancer go away. It works with pimples.''Nana!”

“Marla doesn't have testicular cancer. Marla doesn't have tuberculosis. She isn't dying. Okay in that brain brain-food philosophy way, we're all dying, but Marla isn't dying the way Chloe was dying.”

“We call a cancer bad, they would say, because it kills a man; but you might just as well call a successful surgeon bad because he kills a cancer.”

“Isn't it sad, growing up? You start off like my Charlie. You start off thinking you can kill all the baddies and save the world. Then you get a little bit older, maybe Little Bee's age, and you realize that some of the world's badness is inside you, that maybe you're a part of it. And then you get a bit older still, and a bit more comfortable, and you start wondering whether that badness you've seen in yourself is really all that bad at all. You start talking about ten per cent."Maybe that's just developing as a person, Sarah."I sighed and looked out at Little Bee Well," I said, "maybe this is a developing world.”

“I think it's easy to mistake understanding for empathy - we want empathy so badly. Maybe learning to make that distinction is part of growing up. It's hard and ugly to know somebody can understand you without even liking you.”