“I would have dismissed [the email] as spam, except for the first word: urgent. People stopped flinging that word around like confetti after the Rising. Somehow, the potential for missing the message that zombies just ate your mom made offering to give people a bigger dick seem less important.”

“People throw the word love around like confetti when they actually mean affection.”

“Lahiri's characters, just like people all around us, are constantly telling each other important things, but not necessarily in words.”

“There are a few people out there with whom you fit just so, and, amazingly, you keep fitting just so even after you have growth spurts or lose weight or stop wearing high heels. You keep fitting after you have children or change religions or stop dyeing your hair or quit your job at Goldman Sachs and take up farming. Somehow, God is gracious enough to give us a few of those people, people you can stretch into, people who don't go away, and whom you wouldn't want to go away, even if they offered.”

“Scarlet! It is the first colour I have seen in months. Or so it seems. Scarlet. A little wild poppy, of a red so sudden it made my blood stop. I kept saying the word over and over to myself, scarlet, as if the word, like the colour, had escaped me till now, and just saying it would keep the little windblown flower in sight.”

“I quote my father to people almost every day. Part of that is because if you dispense your own wisdom, others often dismiss it; if you offer wisdom from a third party, it seems less arrogant and more acceptable”