“Reading, as it turned out, is the easy part. Finding a good book is the real challenge. It's a crapshoot. It's like trying to pick stocks or find an intelligent politician.”

“Love is hard. We try to love one another. But generally the quality and quantity of our love for one another is found wanting, because we find it difficult, if not impossible, to look beyond those things that are ugly and unlovable in those we try to love. Even though the things that are ugly and unlovable in ourselves are the very things that cause us to cry out for love.”

“Life is like animal porn, it's not for everyone.”

“My custom has always been to ponder grief; that is, to follow it through ventricle and aorta to find its lurking places.”

“Where does a man go when there are no more corners to turn, when he's running out of hope, out of luck, out of time?”

“Ever have a dream so real you felt you could reach out and touch it?”

“We tried to tell him,' Toronto says.'You made fun of him,' Mazzarella points out.'That was how we tried to tell him.”