“Nothing came in reasonable measure, it seemed, not water or sunshine or sorrow. But joy, too, is immoderate sometimes, and that makes up for the rest.”

“Sometimes Naomi marvelled at how much [children] seemed to know, how their chatter and play landed nearly square on adult matters of love and loneliness and disappointment and joy and regret. It sometimes seemed that they came to these things with clearer eyes than adults who talked themselves out of too much.”

“Every life has a measure of sorrow, and sometimes this is what awakens us.”

“If friendship were a matter of bookkeeping -- so much joy in one column, so much sorrow in the other -- everything would cancel out and you would, it seems, be left with nothing. Yet there must be another factor in the equation, for somehow the joy outweighs the sorrow.”

“Only pain makes it grow stronger. One sorrow makes it kind. Contentment makes it wither, and joy seems to build walls around it. The heart is perverse, and it is cruel. I hate the heart and seems to hate me.”

“We're creating little hedonists,' Frank used to say. 'Nothing will be as pleasurable as this for the rest of their lives. They'll search everywhere for something that can measure up, and nothing will.”