“I think... the secret is to just settle for the shape of your life takes...Instead of you know, always waiting and wishing for what might make you happy.”

“Being in your mid-thirties brought benefits, I reminded myself. You began to appreciate tidiness, smallness, things in their place. This is the shape your life has taken, I said. Be existential. Go to sleep.”

“That time we separated was my idea. I thought, well, I'm fifty years old and there might be someone else out there. People waste their happiness - that's what makes me sad. Everyone's so scared to be happy.”

“God, that’s always the thing you have to decide with high school kids: what to make an issue of, what to let go.”

“What made him most anxious, he told me, was not the big questions -the mercilessness of fate, the possibility of heaven. He was too exhausted, he said, to wrestle with those. But he'd become impatient with the way people wasted their lives, squandered their chances like paychecks. I sat on the bed, massaging his temples, pretending that just the right rubbing might draw out the disease. In the mirror I watched us both -Mr. Pucci, frail and wasted, a talking dead man. And myself with a surgical mask over my mouth, to protect him from me."The irony," he said, "... is that now that I'm this blind man, it's clearer to me now then it's ever been before. What's the line? 'Was blind but now I see...' " He stopped and put his lips to the plastic straw. Juice went halfway up the shaft, then back down again. He motioned the drink away."You accused me of being a saint a while back, pal, but you were wrong. Gary and I were no different. We fought ...said terrible things to each other. Spent one whole weekend not speaking to each other because of a messed-up phone message... That time we separated was my idea. I thought, well, I'm fifty years old and there might be someone else out there. People waste their happiness -that's what makes me sad. Everyone's so scared to be happy.""I know what you mean," I said.His eyes opened wider. For a second he seemed to see me."No you don't," he said. "You mustn’t. He keeps wanting to give you his love, a gift out and out and you dismiss it. Shrug it off because you're afraid.""I'm not afraid. It's more like ..." I watched myself in the mirror above the sink. The mask was suddenly a gag. I listened."l'll give you what I learned from all this," he said. "Accept what people offer. Drink their milkshakes. Take their love.”

“What if I don’t like adventure?Then cultivate a taste for it. Take a chance. That’s how you grow.”

“So I got my stuff and the girl at the register puts these other things in my bag, too. Little free samples: gum and a comb and a marker pen. So I says to her, 'Look, girlie, I got false teeth and I wear a wig.' So she fishes back in my bag and takes out the comb and the gum. Left the pen in there. Anyways, I went back to the van, even though I knew it was locked. Figured I'd just wait and have a smoke. You can't smoke in the van, see? So while I'm waiting there, minding my own business, this car pulls into the handicapped space right next to us--brand-new car, white and clean, and it's got this bumper sticker on it that says, 'Life Is a Shit Sandwich.' Isn't that stupid? So this guy gets out--good-lookin' fella, in his twenties. I say to him, 'Hey, handsome, tell me something.' He takes a look at my walker and gets all panicky. 'I'm just running in for two seconds,' he says. See, he thinks I'm going to yell at him for parking in a handicapped space, but I ain't. I don't give a rat's ass about that, you see. I'd rather walk the extra ten feet than be called handicapped. Where was I?'She amazed me. 'Life's a shit sandwich,' I said.'Oh, yeah. Right. So that guy goes runnin' into the store and here's what I did. I fished that free pen out of the bag and marched right over there to that bumper of his. Got myself right down on the ground--and I wrote--just after the 'Life's a shit sandwich' part--I wrote, 'But only if you're a shithead.' 'Course, then I couldn't get myself back up again--had to yell over to a couple of kids at the phone booth to come pick me back up.”