People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn’t see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick and couldn’t sleep.

From the first minute she was a force every bit as recognizable as her mother. That feeling of life coming into the room was unlike anything I’d ever experienced before, a flood of joy. I thought of it ten years later when I climbed into my grandmother’s bed and held her while she died. The light pouring in and the light going out.

At all times let us recall that every thing we use in this life was here before us and will be here after we are gone. This world and everything in it is on loan, entrusted to our care for our time.

I know that human life shines more brightly because it is but a shimmering candle against an eternity of darkness and it can be extinguished with the faintest breeze.’