“We live in a world made up more of story than stuff. We are creatures of memory more than reminders, of love more than likes.”

The animals are those things that God likes but doesn’t love.

I have so much to say to you. I want to begin at the beginning, because that is what you deserve. I want to tell you everything, without leaving out a single detail. But where is the beginning? And what is everything?

It’s so beautiful at this hour. The sun is low, the shadows are long, the air is cold and clean. You won’t be awake for another five hours, but I can’t help feeling that we’re sharing this clear and beautiful morning.

You can call your turkey organic and torture it daily.

You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.

When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own.

I can only hold on to the things I want to lose.

In the morning, when the nothing vase casts a something shadow, like the memory of someone you’ve lost, what can you say about that?

This is my heart. You are touching it with your left hand. You are touching it with your left hand, not because you are left-handed, although you might be, but because I am holding it against my heart. What you are feeling is the beating of my heart. It is what keeps me alive.

I have no need for the past, I thought, like a child. I did not consider that the past might have a need for me.

Words never mean what we want them to mean.

If I’d been someone else in a different world I’d’ve done something different, but I was myself and the world was the world, so I was silent.

We talked about nothing in particular, but it felt like we were talking about the most important things.

The only thing more painful than being an active forgetter is to be an inert rememberer.

One of the greatest opportunities to live our values-or betray them-lies in the food we put on our plates.

I do think ordinariness is, in a way, the enemy, but not ordinariness as the opposite of flamboyance.

The rain reminds me of his voice, a perfectly composed melody in the sky. Each drop that falls against my window, a dedication to the oceans I would cross – just to sit beside him.

I think the scars that you left me, they remind me you were real.

The smell of oak reminds me of summers spent sleeping under canvas, crackling fires and roasted coffee, the soft sound of guitar and voices in unison.

We are each the authors of our own lives, Emma. We live in what we have created. There is no way to shift the blame and no one else to accept the accolades.

I can’t do this because I can’t…I can’t be the man I want to be with you. And that means that this – this just becomes…another reminder of what I am not.

And remember this, that if you’ve been hated, you’ve also been loved.

Whatever its symbol – cross or crescent or whatever – that symbol is man’s reminder of his duty inside the human race.

The theater needs continual reminders that there is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all.