“If I needed your condescension, I'd ask for it.”

“Acceptance was not in my nature. Even as a young man it seemed to me that everywhere the world conspired against the heart, and though I knew the heart would lose, I couldn't bear to call it right.”

“We grow crisp and crotchety, fully half our organs ignore our commands--whistling to themselves, as it were, while we struggle to bring them to attention--but to balance the ledger we are allowed to dwell on the past, revisit the sites of our old humiliations, reread (without the aid of spectacles) our own misjudgments. And we do, believing that it was there, in our past, that our last best chance for happiness lay hidden; that somewhere in that thicket, now dense with self-recrimination and foolishness, trickled a freshet of joy powerful enough to redeem us.”

“Gone. The saddest word in the language. In any language.”

“...like a small stone deflected off a larger one, my brother had spun off toward the Almighty, though to my mind the events of that morning could just as well have cast him the other way.”

“Consider it: Who but God could have dreamed a tale so absurd and so heartless?”

“Such is the privilege of survival: to be allowed to fashion the means that fit our ends, to cobble together a narrative that reveals (as by the divine light of illumination) the predestined arc of our days. This is no small gift. With it we can neutralize all but the greatest losses, reduce even the greatest bastards to nothing more than bit actors in the drama of our lives, put on this earth for the sole purpose of forwarding our cause. Blessed are those who can believe their own stories.”