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I once heard an elder say that the dead who have no use for their words leave them as part of their children's inheritance. Proverbs, teeth suckings, obscenities, even grunts and moans once inserted in special places during conversations, all are passed along to the next heir. (p265)

'If a woman is worth remembering,' said my grandmother, 'there is no need to have her name carved in letters.' (p165)

"Only good deeds demand respect." (chapter 15, p110)

He found he was a man who repented almost everything, regrets crowding in around him like moths to a light. This was actually the main difference between twenty-one and fifty-one, he decided, the sheer volume of regret.

Isn’t that reality? Won’t most of us die in fairly unclimactic ways, our passing unremarked by almost everyone, our deaths becoming plot points in the narratives of the people around us?

What you have to understand is that bureaucracy is an organism, and the prime goal of every organism is self-protection. Bureaucracy exists to protect itself.

“Hell is other actors,” Kirsten said. “Also ex-boyfriends.”

My point is, there’s always something. I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.

Tesch seems to be someone who mistakes rudeness for intellectual rigor.

Hell is the absence of the people you long for.

Everything offended Jessica, which is inevitable when you move through the world in search of offense.

If there’s pleasure in action, there’s peace in stillness.