“He wished the man would honor the true meaning of words, instead of using them as ammunition.”

“take words and make them useful,' she told me. 'drain them of all the crappy meanings they used to mean and make them mean something useful instead.”

“A man who uses a great many words to express his meaning is like a bad marksman who, instead of aiming a single stone at an object, takes up a handful and throws at it in hopes he may hit.”

“We are full of words whose true meaning we haven't been taught, and one of those words is suffering. Another is the word death. We don't know what they mean, but we use them, and this is a mystery.”

“He wished that the mathematics of the world were like the mathematics of the heart - then his equal love and hate would mean he felt nothing instead of double.”

“Earl rarely used the word, but his whole system of teaching and his whole way of living was built around the concept of honor. You honored God by using your time wisely, and you honored your fellow man by treating him with respect. You honored your teacher by calling him "sir," and he honored his students by challenging them to face pain and become stronger. Earl had come to associate charity with pain, and he believed that love did its deepest work when applied to a wound.”