“The best=laid plans, one's most fastidious contingency strategies have revealed themselves in the cold light of day to be laughably inadequate, no match for the happenstance that seems of late only to promise death, mayhem, poverty, flood. And here you are, having spent all that time protecting your home from the oncoming elements only to find that it has been shored up with crackers.”

“Oncoming death is terrible enough, but worse still is oncoming death with time to spare, time in which all the happiness that was yours and all the happiness that might have been yours becomes clear to you. You see with utter lucidity all that you are losing.”

“I have been careless, and so have been thwarted by luck and chance, those wreckers of all but the best laid plans.”

“It’s only been a few weeks and somehow I seem to have gotten far from shore.”

“This was the feeling that Ms. Hempel couldn't shake: a conviction that she spent her days among people at the age when they are most purely themselves. How could she not be depleted when she came home, having been exposed for hours, without protection, to all those thrumming radiant selves? Here they were, just old enough to have discovered their souls, but not yet dulled by the ordinary act of survival, not yet practiced in dissembling.”

“Randy Pausch on time management:Here's what I know:Time must be explicitly managed, like money.You can always change your plan, but only if you have one.Ask yourself: Are you spending your time on the right things?Develop a good filing system.Rethink the telephone.Delegate.Take a time out.Time is all you have. And you may find one day that you have less than you think.”