“With time, grief has a way of slipping down in the crevices of your heart. It never really leaves; it just makes room for more.”

“You can never make peace with grief, sweetie. You just work out a way to live with the war grief wages in your heart.”

“It was the kind of promise a father makes easily and sincerely, knowing at the same time that it will be impossible to keep. The truth of some promises is not as important as whether or not you can believe in them, with all your heart. A game of baseball can't really make a summer day last forever. A home run can't really heal all the broken places in our world, or in a single human heart. And there was no way that Mr. Feld could keep his promise never to leave Ethan again. All parents leave their children one day.”

“And a real, undoubted grief is sometimes capable of making a solid and steadfast man even out of a phenomenally light-minded one, if only for a short time; moreover, real and true grief has sometimes even made fools more intelligent, also only for a time, of course; grief has this property.”

“But intelligence officers never really retire, they just slip into the shadows.”

“They say time is money, but that's not true. Time is life. And if I want the fullest life, I need to find fullest time... the busyness of your life leaving little room for the source of your life...God gives us time. And who has time for God?Which makes no sense.”