“Don't we all deserve forgiveness? I hope we do; I believe we do. Forgiveness says as much about the character of the person bestowing it as the person receiving it. Learning to forgive may be the most difficult of human acts,and the closest thing to divinity, whatever you decide that is.”

“Kittredge had obviously misjudged her, but he had learned that was the way with most people. The story was never the story, and it surprised you, how much another person could carry.”

“As long as we remember a person, they're not really gone. Their thoughts, their feelings, their memories, they become a part of us.”

“Real courage is doing the right thing when nobody's looking. Doing the unpopular thing because it's what you believe, and the heck with everybody.”

“It was possible, he understood, for a person's life to become just a long series of mistakes, and that the end, when it came, was just one more mistake in a chain of bad choices. The thing was, most of these mistakes were actually borrowed from other people. You took their bad ideas, and for whatever reason, made them your own.”

“We live, we die. Somewhere along the way, if we're lucky, we may find someone to help lighten the load.”

“Jesus tells Peter to forgive seventy times seven times, not because the person we forgive will it that many times, but because resentment can have such a grip on our hearts that we need to forgive that often for our own healing.”