"All this drama, all this waiting and hoping and crying over things we'd been told, raised on, warned about, these monumental milestones that ended up lasting only minutes in our lives and were never, ever as wonderful or horrible as you thought they would be."

"Even when there was love involved, something always seemed to hurt"

"She would look like the best of us and grow up laughing. Her laugh would sound like silver bells when we lifted her in and out of the shallow waves at the shoreline."

'Ah, you kids,' he said. 'You think you invented it. All of it! Everything. You think you invented life.'

"Part of me was afraid I might be missing something, but I was always afraid of missing something. We all were."

"There were still times when it felt like I was watching a movie starring everyone I knew in the world, except me."

And then she'd smile wide and hold out her arms, and say, 'If I knew you were going to be this beautiful, I never would have let you go.'

Between any two beings there is a unique, uncrossable distance, an unenterable sanctuary. Sometimes is takes the shape of aloneness. Sometimes is takes the shape of love.

Life is precious, Jacob thought. It is the most important of all thoughts, and the most obvious, and the most dificult to remember to have

You're afraid that letting anything out will leave you open to letting things in.

Without love, you die. With love, you also die. Not all deaths are equal.

They were singing, and I knew the song, but not how to join them.

You want to belive that your work should have the significance of a war, that a long marriage should offer the same kind of excitement as a first date

There are only two kinds of Jews of his generation: those who perished and those who survived. We swore our allengiance to the victims, were good on our promise never to forget them. But we turned our backs on those who endured, and forgot them. All our love was for the dead.

The absence of the expression of pain is not the absence of pain

"I wanted to tell you whatever is the genuine version of I am sorry for your loss."
"I don't belive in genuine versions."
"I wish you less sadness, How about that?"

Silence can be as irrepressible as laughter. And it can accumulate, like weightless snowflakes. It can collapse a ceiling.

There are no miracles. Not anymore. And there are no cures for the hurt that hurts the most. There is only the medicine of beliving each other's pain, and being present for it

"I'm sorry I hurt you"
"Why did you do it?"
"Because it was a cowardly way to hurt myself"

"You're lonely, and I look like a Band-Aid."