“What kind of wife would I be if I left your father simply because he was dead?”

“His life was two lives now: the life he would have and the life he would forever wonder about.”

“This is what happens when you live in dreams, he thought: you dream this and you dream that and you sleep right through your life.”

“Stories are people. I'm a story, you're a story...your father is a story. Our stories go in every direction, but sometimes, if we're lucky, our stories join into one, and for awhile, we're less alone.”

“And because he felt like he might burst open and because he lacked the dexterity in English to say all that he was thinking--how in his estimation, the more you lived the more regret and longing you suffered, that life was a glorious catastrophe--Pasquale Tursi said, only, "Yes.”

“„Listen,” Richard says, „unless you're about to inherit some money, what we're talking about here is irreversible, fatal. You have fiscal Ebola, Matt. You are bleeding out through your nose and your mouth and your eye sockets, from your financial asshole.” See! Fiscal Ebola? My financial asshole is bleeding? This was exactly why I started poetfolio.com; there are money poets everywhere.”

“He wished he could reassure his mother: a man wants many things in life, but when one of them is also the right thing, he would be a fool not to choose it.”