“I stand here on this spring day in the center of my life. Chaos, din, and beauty. For a moment, I am still.”

“My life - my real life - started when a man walked into it, a handsome stranger in a perfectly cut suit, and, yes I know how that sounds.”

“But I've always been a sucker for externals alone: the shape, the shine, what the surface suggests to my palm. So mechanically disinclined it's verging on criminal, I never understood the beauty of an object's workings until Linny sat my reluctant self down one day and showed me her camera. Within fifteen minutes, I had fallen hard for the whole gadgety, eyelike nature of the thing: a tiny piece of glass slowing, bending, organizing light - light - into your grandmother, the Grand Canyon, the begonia on the windowsill, the film keeping the image like a secret. Grandmother, canyon, begonia tucked neatly into the sleek black box, like bugs in a jar. My mind boggled.”

“What’s killing him is the idea that I will die unhappy, in a miserable marriage. He hates that my life isn’t ending on a good note… So I told him that he’s a good man and was the love of my life, both of which are true. I tried to tell him all the things I hadn’t told him before… Mostly, I wanted him to understand the real reason I’d thought our marriage was over. It was over because we forgot to stay in love. Both of us.”

“I can't stand lies. Probably no one can. Probably everyone is, to varying degrees, allergic to them, both spiritually and physically. Lies make me feel low and ignoble, and also itchy, like there's sand under my skin. The only thing that feels worse than hearing a lie is telling one.”

“You know what I mean. That moment in a relationship in which, at the same time you discover you've been floating in air for 5 and 1/2 weeks you also discover that your feet have dropped a little closer to earth.”

“Chicken Soup for the Soul". You've heard of these books, am I right? We've all heard of them. But I wonder if you're aware of just how many "Chicken Soup" books exist on the planet. No offense, but I doubt it. I doubt it because in the time it would take you to come up with a number, the number would have become obsolete. Even as you read this, in some quiet, fecund place, another "Chicken Soup" book is being born.”