“In a flashback, we hear Holly's mother summing up her life in a conversation with her husband, Wylie: "My life is one big mistake," she said. "No, it's not," he said. "It's a series of small mistakes.”

“Throughout her life, whenever Mom was sad or confuse or disoriented, she could never concentrate on television, she said, but always sought refuge in a book. Books focused her mind, calmed her, took her outside of herself; television jangled her nerves.”

“When your wondering what to say, or how you look... just remember... she is already out with you. That means, she said yes, when she could've said no. That means she made a plan... when she could've just blown you off. So that means it is no longer you job to make her like you... It's is your job NOT TO MESS IT UP.”

“When you're young your mother shields you from the world because she thinks you're too young to understand, and when she's old you shield her because she's too old to understand - or to have any more understanding inflicted upon her. The curve of life goes: want to know, know, don't want to know.”

“The idea is that if you practice the Naikan part of Constructive Living, life becomes a series of small miracles, and you may start to notice everything that goes right in a typical life and not the few things that go wrong.”

“We all make mistakes, but intelligence enables us to do it on purpose.”

“We're all in the end-of-your-life book-club, whether we acknowledge it or not; each book we read may well be the last, each conversation the final one.”