“It seemed to her such nonsense-inventing differences, when people, heaven knows, were different enough without that.”

“It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.”

“You have to thank God for the seemingly good and the seemingly bad because really, you don't know the difference [until we get to heaven].”

“And it seemed hard to believe that these people who were so close to me couldn’t see how desperate I was, or if they could they didn’t care enough to do anything about it, or if they cared enough to do anything about it they didn’t believe there was anything they could do, not knowing—or not wanting to know—that their belief might have been the thing that made the difference.”

“People had figured out all sorts of ways to makethings seem different than they truly were.”

“He'd lived long enough to know that everyone handled grief in different ways, and little by little, they all seemed to accept their new lives.”