Quotes from Jeanne Marie Laskas

Living people mess you up. Living people are messy.

Solitude helps you figure out where everybody else stops and you begin

Depression isn't a thing that lifts or disappears just because of a change of scenery. The voice follows you no matter where you go, reminding you that you are worthless.

And I don't think anybody ever gets over loss. I think you get through it. You let it get through you.

Mike Kelleher from Obama's Senate office was the person who stepped up to tackle the mess… He built the staff, drew up a ten-page strategic plan for the mail-room, wrote algorithms for a mail coding system, set up a casework decision tree, assembled a library of policy-response letters, and developed quality-control manuals.

If it hurts so much that you have to bubble-wrap your body, maybe you should play something different.

Solitude is a luxury for the lucky. For people who don't have sick cats and lost ladybugs and very possibly dying loved ones to worry about. For people who don't have to worry about getting their hands dirty with the everyday goo of ordinary suffering.

One of the ways a landfill engineer anywhere in the world earns bragging rights is if he can pour himself a glass of the leachate from his landfill and drink it.

Every coal miner I talked to had, in his history, at least one story of a cave-in. 'Yeah, he got covered up,' is a way coal miners refer to fathers and brothers and sons who got buried alive.

There's no telling how many guns we have in America - and when one gets used in a crime, no way for the cops to connect it to its owner. The only place the police can turn for help is a Kafkaesque agency in West Virginia, where, thanks to the gun lobby, computers are illegal and detective work is absurdly antiquated.

Football is in a guy's DNA. A primal thing. You should play it so you can talk about the glory days when you get older and drink Bud with the guys from the office. Get it done when you're young, while you have the chance.

Dead at 50. Mike Webster! Nine-time Pro Bowler. Hall of Famer. 'Iron Mike,' legendary Steelers center for fifteen seasons.

Fallon tells me about first starting 'Late Night': how he knew audiences were dubious.

It's the subconcussive hits, the constant bam, bam, bam that linemen like Suh give and receive. Those are the hits scientists say cause the lasting damage to the brain, the kind of injuries that made guys like Mike Webster, Terry Long, and so many others go crazy. The subconcussive hits - every single play.

You can make your life so much larger simply be acknowledging everyone else's.

One thing Jim McGreevey wants the world to know: Leading a double life as a gay man trying to appear straight was easy for him to pull off. He was 'good' at it. Not only that - it helped him become a better politician.

Mike Webster lost all his money or, maybe, gave it away. He forgot. A lot of lawsuits. Mike Webster forgot how to eat, too. Soon, Mike Webster was homeless, living in a truck, one of its windows replaced with a garbage bag and tape.

You can't think 'Dole' without thinking 'Bob Dole' and cartoons and third-person good times. He was one of those politicians: the kind you jabbed but were happy enough to have around.

When people spot Fallon in public, they do not shriek or drool or go wobbly in the knees. It's a different look entirely. A tilt of the head, mouth agape, eyebrows rolled like you do when you see a puppy.

Buzz was, of course, the second man to walk on the moon. Buzz made a rap video, 'Rocket Experience,' with Snoop Dogg. He did the cha-cha and the fox-trot and was eliminated in the second round of season ten of 'Dancing with the Stars'.

Whether we buy into the rhetoric or not, one thing has been made clear: Illegal immigration is a problem reaching a breaking point, and something must be done.

Maine is the largest producer of wild blueberries in the world. The woody plants occur naturally in the sandy gravel understory of Maine's coastal forests, where little else bothers even trying to grow.

Omalu first found the tau 'threads' in the brain of former Steeler Mike Webster in 2002 and published his findings in 2005, in the journal 'Neurosurgery.'

In the early 16th century the Italian physician Jacopo Berengario da Carpi, a pioneer in the science of anatomy, came up with the idea that perhaps 'brain commotion' was caused by the thrust of the soft structure of the brain against the solid case of the skull.