“Beneath the people we think we are, there are funnier, happier, livelier people that we keep ignoring.”

“I’m going to strip my way through plumber’s school. What do you think of the stage name Fine-Ass Frankie?”

“Every second you spend holding someone else back is time not running the race yourself.”

“If you have good sex, you've done a lot right in life.”

“We angels are misconceived in the human world. People perceive us as kindly and bountiful; when, in truth, we are about as fluffy, as gentle, as yielding, as rattlesnakes.”

“Yes,” said Mamma, “this is the worst of life, that love does not give us common sense but is a sure way of losing it. We love people, and we say that we are going to do more for them than friendship, but it makes such fools of us that we do far less, indeed sometimes what we do could be mistaken for the work of hatred.”

“[she used to say that] each of us has a veil between ourselves and the rest of the world – like a bride wears on her wedding day—except this kind of veil is invisible. we walk around happily with these invisible veils hanging down over our faces. the world is kind of blurry. we like it that way. but sometimes our veils are pushed away for a few moments – like there’s a wind blowing it from our faces – and when the veil lifts, we can see the world as it really is, just for those few seconds before it settles down again. we see all the beauty and cruelty and sadness and love, but mostly we are happy not to. some people learn to lift the veils themselves. then they don’t have to depend on the wind anymore. ...it’s just her way of saying that most of the time people get distracted by little stuff, and ignore the big stuff.”