Food for thought from "The Laughing Place" by Pam Durban:

Because mortality is not something you can know until it touches you, until you see that it's not something that happens to you, it's something you are.  And knowing that is like being let in on a secret about everyone else in the world as well.

She tried to be casual about it, but Mother cannot hide her feelings, which, in a funny way, is why you can trust her.

My trouble is that I confuse the way I want things to be with the way they are.

There is a stillness about him when he listens, a seriousness, a kind of respect, as though he knows the difference between who people hope to be and who they are, and why they have to keep talking, trying to match one with the other.

Because the truth of any life is how it changes.  And if that is so, then how frail and transient are the certainties on which we base our lives.

Sometimes, throwing the words ahead of you and then following where they lead is the only way to move.

I want to take up patience.  I want eyes to see, ears to hear, a heart to love the smallest sign of life.  In these there is no betrayal, because there are no promises, only the moment-by-moment willingness to believe.

And what is forgiveness but the constant giving up of innocence, a widening to allow for more of the world's possibilities?

Because we dream of wholes, of pure, polished shapes, but we live by fractions and moments.