Quotes from Will Schwalbe

She never wavered in her conviction that books are the most powerful tool in the human arsenal, that reading all kinds of books, in whatever format you choose—electronic (even though that wasn't for her) or printed, or audio—is the grandest entertainment, and also is how you take part in the human conversation.

there's something you can always tell people who want to learn more about the world and who don't know how to find a cause to support. You can always tell them to read.

The poem begins, "About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters: how well they understood / Its human position; how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.

when you are running away from something, it often ends up coming with you, especially if the thing you are running away from is your own behavior.

What I suddenly understood was that a thank-you note isn't the price you pay for receiving a gift, as so many children think it is, a kind of minimum tribute or toll, but an opportunity to count your blessings. And gratitude isn't what you give in exchange for something; it's what you feel when you are blessed—blessed to have family and friends who care about you, and who want to see you happy. Hence the joy from thanking.

questing is more important than finding, and a journey is more important than the mere arrival at a destination

it felt like I was headed right back to where I started—that once again I could lose everything I had, and that maybe I didn't deserve any of it. Maybe I had done something wrong.

stop using feelings as an excuse for their actions and the

And when people would say to Mom, "I'll include you in my prayers," it gave her great solace. It wasn't a platitude for her—when she knew people were praying for her, it was something concrete and immense.

Good books often answer question you did not even know you wanted to ask

books are the most powerful tool in the human arsenal, that reading all kinds of books, in whatever format you choose—electronic (even though that wasn't for her) or printed, or audio—is the grandest entertainment, and also is how you take part in the human conversation. Mom

And there's something you can always tell people who want to learn more about the world and who don't know how to find a cause to support. You can always tell them to read.

one of the things I learned from Mom is this: Reading isn't the opposite of doing; it's the opposite of dying.

The Painted Veil

a book by David K. Reynolds, who had, in the early 1980s, come up with a system he called Constructive Living, a Western combination of two different kinds of Japanese psychotherapies, one based on getting people to stop using feelings as an excuse for their actions and the other based on getting people to practice gratitude.

He longed for a minute that didn't matter: perhaps for time to take a nap or watch something silly on television without feeling guilt or regret. He needed relief from the feeling that he was wasting precious time, not the added pressure of life's greatest to-do list. I now realize that humans require down time. Quiet time is necessary to process all that happens to us on a daily basis—let alone over the course of a life.

For me, there's something about planes that isolates and intensifies sadness, the way a looking glass can magnify the sun until it grows unbearably hot and burns.

One of Mom's favorite passages from Gilead was: "This is an important thing, which I have told many people, and which my father told me, and which his father told him. When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question is being put to you. So you must think, What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation?

What's odd about commencement is that so many people think of it as the end of something, the end of high school or college--but that's not what the word means at all. It means the beginning, the start of something new.

1. You have nothing to fear. Remember that your vote is secret. Only you and your God know how you vote. 2.

We're all in the end-of-our-life book club, whether we acknowledge it or not; each book we read may well be the last, each conversation the final one.

You don't have to have one emotion at a time.

It's not hard to read about death abstractly. I do find it tough when a character I love dies, of course. You can truly miss characters. Not like you miss people, but you can still miss them.