““I’m fine. I just…I don’t want to go in just yet. I just want to sit and not have to think about…I just…want to be a man who has been to a concert with a girl in a red dress. Just for a few minutes more.”

There is a whole lot more to life than winning.

I thought anything might happen if I wasn’t vigilant. I didn’t eat. I didn’t go out. I didn’t want to see anyone. But I survived, Paul.

My nerve endings seemed to have come alive; they almost jangled with anticipation I was going to see Will. Whatever else,

If all we are allowed is hours, minutes, I want to be able to etch each of them on to my memory with exquisite clarity so that I can recall them at moments like this, when my very soul feels blackened.

I realized I was afraid of living without him. How is it you have the right to destroy my life, I wanted to demand of him, but I’m not allowed a say in yours? But I had promised.

There are normal hours, and then there are invalid hours, where time stalls and slips, where life—real life—seems to exist at one remove.

She does not want to feel even the faintest temptation to call his mobile number, as she had done obsessively for the first year after his death so she could hear his voice on the answering service.

You know, you spend your whole life feeling like you don’t quite fit in anywhere.

I wanted to press every bit of me against him. I wanted to will something into him. I wanted to give him every bit of life I felt and force him to live.

I let him know a hurt had been mended in a way that he couldn’t have known, and for that alone there would always be a piece of me indebted to him.

I frowned at the list. “So… I’ll go back and tell the Traynors that I’m going to get their suicidal quadriplegic son drunk, spend their money on strippers and lap dancers, and then trundle him off to the Disability Olympics-

… if you’re going to wear a dress like that you need to wear it with confidence. You need to fill it out mentally as well as physically.

I just tried to be, tried to absorb the man I loved through osmosis, tried to imprint what I had left of him on myself. I did not speak.

Sometimes, she realizes suddenly, it is simply a matter of blind faith.

Sometimes when you get hammered till the small hours you feel pretty good in the morning, but really it’s just because you’re still a bit drunk.

When you put someone down all the time, eventually they stop listening to the sensible stuff.

The doors of churches, hotels, concert halls and reading rooms are alike closed against the Negro as a man, but every place is open to him as a servant.

Don’t get me wrong – I’ve gone to a club. But I’d much rather be with my close friends at home or a concert, or on a trip. I’ll go dancing with my grandma. She likes to cut a rug!

If you realize you are only a violin, you can open yourself up to the world by playing your role in the concert.

Some may remember, if you have good memories, that there used to be a concept in Anglo-American law called a presumption of innocence, innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

There’s no idea or concept in comedy you could do that hasn’t been attacked from some angle. But if you start leaving punchlines out so you’ll look cool, I don’t get that. But I don’t watch standup anyway, so I don’t know what they’re doing.

Even very young children need to be informed about dying. Explain the concept of death very carefully to your child. This will make threatening him with it much more effective.

What made me want to play guitar was that painting of Wings in concert in the gatefold of Wings Over America. It looked so exciting… I wanted to be part of it.

But I did become fairly proficient as a pianist and my teachers felt I had talent and wanted me to become a good concert pianist and earn my living that way.