"Sometimes, kids want you to hurt the way they hurt."

"Dying is only one thing to be sad over. Living unhappily is something else."

"Everyone is in such a hurry. People haven’t found meaning in their lives, so they’re running all the time looking for it. They think the next car, the next house, the next job. Then they find those things are empty, too, and they keep running. Once you start running, it’s hard to slow yourself down."

"Sometimes, love brings you together even as life keeps you apart."

"It’s very simple. As you grow, you learn more. If you stayed at twenty-two, you’d always be as ignorant as you were at twenty-two. Aging is not just decay, you know. It’s growth. It’s more than the negative that you’re going to die, it’s also the positive that you understand you’re going to die, and that you live a better life because of it."

"I thought about the days i had handed over to a bottle..the nights i can't remember..the mornings i slept thru..all the time spent running from myself."

"The story of my recent life.' I like that phrase. It makes more sense than 'the story of my life', because we get so many lives between birth and death. A life to be a child. A life to come of age. A life to wander, to settle, to fall in love, to parent, to test our promise, to realize our mortality- and in some lucky cases, to do something after that realization."

"Because if you've found meaning in your life, you don't want to go back. You want to go forward."

"There are five people you meet in heaven. Each of us was in your life for a reason. You may not have known the reason at the time, and that is what heaven is for. For understanding your life on earth. This is the greatest gift God can give you: to understand what happened in your life. To have it explained. It is the peace you have been searching for."

"When you are measuring life, you are not living it."

"It's such a shame to waste time. We always think we have so much of it."

"In order to move on, you must understand why you felt what you did and why you no longer need to feel it."

"You can go your whole life collecting days, and none will outweigh the one you wish you had back."

"Going back to something is harder than you think."

"Sharing tales of those we've lost is how we keep from really losing them."

"Each affects the other, and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one."

"There are no random acts...We are all connected...You can no more separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind..."

"Sacrifice is a part of life. It's supposed to be. It's not something to regret. It's something to aspire to."

"All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair."

"Death ends a life, not a relationship."

"I love you every day. And now I will miss you every day."

"Kids chase the love that eludes them."