“I wasn't lost, or frozen, or gone... I was alive; I was alive in my own perfect world.”

“So there are cakes and pillows and colors galore, but underneath this more obvious patchwork quilt are places like a quiet room where you can go hold someone’s hand and not have to say anything. Give no story. Make no claim. Where you can live at the edge of your skin for as long as you wish. This wide wide heaven is about flat head nails and the soft down of new leaves, wild roller coaster rides and escaped marbles that fall, then hang, then take you somewhere you could never imagined in your small-heaven dreams.”

“If I've learned anything, it's that we can never let the chaos and injustice make us so blind with anger that we become part of the problem. Understanding compassion, kindness, and love are the only true revolutionary ideals. When we compromise those we become what we despise, and we lose our humanity.”

“There is no such thing as objectivity. We are all just interpreting signals from the universe and trying to make sense of them. Dim, shaky, weak, static-y little signals that only hint at the complexity of a universe we cannot begin to understand.”

“She always used to suspect that the price for happiness, the price for enjoying the company of a person you loved, was the steadily increasing risk of losing them, and at times, when she considered the possibility that she might lose Isabel or Clancy or, in the early days, Todd, Bernice didn't think she could stand it, didn't think she could go on living in a universe whose laws forced her to submit to such a terrible fear. Now she sees what a small price it is to pay, what staggering joy she received in return. You should be willing to pay that price for as little as a few days or hours with a person you love, she thinks, rubbing her fingers across a patch of linoleum the years have worn down to a cloudy smear.”

“People who hate are boring. Love is where excitement lives.”

“But you, Achilles,/ There is not a man in the world more blest than you--/ There never has been, never will be one./ Time was, when you were alive, we Argives/ honored you as a god, and now down here, I see/ You Lord it over the dead in all your power./ So grieve no more at dying, great Achilles.’I reassured the ghost, but he broke out protesting,/ ‘No winning words about death to me, shining Odysseus!/ By god, I’d rather slave on earth for another man--/ Some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive—than rule down here over all the breathless dead.”