Rough as life can be, I know in my bones we are supposed to stick around and play our part. Even if that part is coughing to death from cigarettes, or being blown up young in a house with your mother watching. And even if it's to be that mother. Someone down the line might need to know you got through it. Or maybe someone you won't see coming will need you. Like a kid who asks you to help him clean motel rooms. Or some ghost who drifts your way, hungry. And good people might even ask you to marry them. And it might be you never know the part you played, what it meant to someone to watch you make your way each day. Maybe someone or something is watching us all make our way. I don't think we get to know why. It is, as Ben would say about most of what I used to worry about, none of my business.

There are no words precise enough to describe how wide and empty the world is when you lose someone that matters to you as much as Penny did to me.

[W]e’ve learned that grief can sometimes get loud, and when it does, we try not to speak over it.

I’ve never been one to go to church, but I’ve al was ways believed in a creative intelligence behind the ongoing riddle of the world.

I knew I didn’t want to be alone anymore.

Some trees love an ax, a drunk old-timer mumbled one night at the Tap, back when she still went there, and something in what he said rang true, but when she later remembered what he'd said, she disagreed and though instead that the tree gets used to the ax, which has nothing to do with love. It settles into being chipped away at, bit by bit, blade by blade, until it doesn't feel anything anymore, and then, because nothing else can happen, what's left crumbles to dust.

[A]s a parent you just have no idea what anything means. On some level everything your kids do and say is in code.

The world’s magic sneaks up on you in secret, settles next to you when you have your head turned.