“Your pimples are the Lord's way of chastising you. Now eat your pie.”

“When you're five and you hurt, you make a big noise in the world. At ten you whimper. But by the time you make fifteen you begin to eat the poisoned apples that grow on your own inner tree of pain.”

“If I show up at your house ten years from now and find nothing in your living room but The Readers Digest, nothing on your bedroom night table but the newest Dan Brown novel, and nothing in your bathroom but Jokes for the John, I’ll chase you down to the end of your driveway and back, screaming ‘Where are your books? You graduated college ten years ago, so how come there are no damn books in your house? Why are you living on the intellectual equivalent of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese?”

“I know your mother lives in your head - almost everyone's mother does, I guess - but you can't let her have her way on this one”

“It'll be your damnation, boy. You'll wear out a hundred pairs of boots on your way to hell.”

“She couldn't be on his wavelength all the time. That's all. When you could recognize that and deal with it, you were on your way to an adult relationship.”

“It's like the old pie-in-the-face routine: it stops being funny when it starts being you.”