“You sit around feelin' sorry for yourself and you're dead. Sittin' on your ass can get to be a disease worse than what you got.”

“Let me tell you something, my wife died for Tuesdays ago. Cancer of the colon. We were married forty-one years. Now you stop feeling sorry for yourself and lose some of that pork of yours. Pretty girl like you - you don't want to do this yourself.”

“that's the funny thing about mazes: what's baffling on the ground begins to makes sense when you can begin to rise above it, the better to understand your history and fix yourself". (p. 717)”

“You can be two things if you're a woman, Dolores. Betty Crocker or a floozy. Just remember your place - even if it kills you.”

“If your twin was dead, were you still a twin?”

“It's like there's this wave coming toward me, but there's nothing I can do about it. And then it reaches me, crashes over me and...and I'm done for another day. I just give up. Give in to it. Because how do you stop a wave?You don't. And you're wise to recognize your powerlessness to do so. But what you can do is learn how to negotiate this wave. Work within the context of its inevitability.”

“Life's a shit sandwich, my ass. Life's a polka and don't you forget it!”