"There are neither raptures, nor ecstasies, nor transports of bliss in the pleasures of the table; but they make up in duration what they lose in intensity, and are distinguished above all by the merit of inclining us towards all the other pleasures of life, or at least of consoling us for the loss of them."

"Look around you. Everything changes. Everything on this earth is in a continuous state of evolving, refining, improving, adapting, enhancing…changing. You were not put on this earth to remain stagnant."

"I talk to people of different ages, and a guy who's 38 who says, 'I could've played Major League Baseball, but I had this knee injury...' Yeah, probably not. It's a big thing with men and sports, where they think they could have touched that thing."

"It's a strange poverty of the English language, and indeed, of many other languages, that we use this same word, 'depression' to describe how a kid feels when it rains on his birthday, and to describe how somebody feels the minute before they commit suicide."

"For grief has always been so dear to you that you would make me writhing in pain in the brothel of your imaginations than to be playing with a bunch of balloons in the yard where I should have been.'And may be that's why, you'd rather talk to me about this, than to write a story about me where I could live happily."

"We'll never find that one, and I'll be blamed,' announced Edd Tollett, the dour grey-haired squire everyone called Dolorous Edd. 'Nothing ever goes missing that they don't look at me, ever since that time I lost my horse. As if that could be helped. He was white and it was snowing, what did they expected."

"The Anglican service today was more familiar to me from movies. Like one of the great Shakespeare speeches, the graveside oration, studded in fragments in the memory, was a succession of brilliant phrases, book titles, dying cadences that breathed life, pure alertness, along the spine."

"The first thing I tried to do in the months after losing my mother was to write a poem. I found myself turning to poetry in the way so many people do - to make sense of losses. And I wrote pretty bad poems about it. But it did feel that the poem was the only place that could hold this grief."