“People have to experience things that terrify them. If they don't, how will they ever come to appreciate safety?”

“How come people don't do things like that nowadays? You grope around in the back of a sedan in high school and you think you're in love. Nobody gets swept off their feet anymore.”

“A lot of people have opinions, but I don't think they ever ask themselves why their opinions are what they are.”

“People believe in God because they don't have any other explanation for things that happen.”

“I could tell her from personal experience that when people we love make choices we don't always understand them. But we can go on loving them, just the same. It isn't a matter of comprehension. It's forgiveness. But all this took me a lifetime to discover, and where has it gotten me?... Some lessons can't be taught, they simply have to be learned.”

“I wondered about the explorers who'd sailed their ships to the end of the world. How terrified they must have been when they risked falling over the edge; how amazed to discover, instead, places they had seen only in their dreams.”

“We all have things that come back to haunt us. Some of us just see them more clearly than others.”