“One withers, another grows.”

“You say you should have died instead of me. But during my time on earth, people died instead of me, too. It happens every day. When lightning strikes a minute after you are gone, or an airplane crashes that you might have been on. When your colleague falls ill and you do not. We think such things are random. But there is a balance to it all. One withers, another grows. Birth and death are part of a whole.”

“I have come to teach you that there are no random acts. That we are all connected. That you can no more separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind. ... Did you ever wonder? Why people gather when others die? Why people feel that they should?It is because the human spirit knows, deep down, that all lives intersect. That death doesn't just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between taken and being missed, lives are changed. ...there is a balance to it all. One withers, another grows. Birth and death are part of a whole. ...The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone.”

“Maybe death is the great equalizer, the one big thing that can finally make strangers shed a tear for one another.”

“another family story is forges, one that father and son will laugh about for decades. This is how a legacy is built. One memory at a time.”

“No story sits by itself. Sometimes stories meet at corners and sometimes they cover one another completely, like stones beneath a river.”

“As children grow, they gravitate to their fates.”