Quotes from Will Schwalbe

Reading is a respite from the restlessness of technology, but it's not only that. It's how I reset and recharge. It's how I escape, but it's also how I engage. And reading should spur further engagement.

1. Ask: "Do you want to talk about how you're feeling?" 2. Don't ask if there's anything you can do. Suggest things, or if it's not intrusive, just do them. 3. You don't have to talk all the time. Sometimes just being there is enough.

sThat's enriched my life more than I can say. Of course you could do more—you can always do more, and you should do more—but still, the important thing is to do what you can, whenever you can.

How great, I thought, to honor people while they are still alive.

reading all kinds of books, in whatever format you choose -- electronic or printed or audio -- is the grandest entertainment, and also is how you take part in the human conversation.

But mostly, when I look back, what I remember is not Mom rushing about; it's Mom sitting quietly in the center of the house, in the living room, under the swirling colors of a Paul Jenkins painting; there would be a fire in the fireplace and a throw over her lap, her hands sticking out to hold a book. And we all wanted to be there with her and Dad, reading quietly too.

I think it's because it shows that people--or hobbits, as the case may be--can find strength they didn't know they had.

Oh, dear--did I forget to mention that you can, indeed, have it all, but you need a lot of help!

I like books. I don't read them. But I like them.

And reading all different kinds of books is not simply reading all different kinds of books; it's a way of becoming more fully human and more humane.

It is not by regretting what is irreparable that true work is to be done, but by making the best of what we are. It is not by complaining that we have not the right tools, but by using well the tools we have. What we are, and where we are is God's providential arrangement - God's doing, though it may be man's misdoing; and the manly and the wise way is to look your disadvantages in the face, and see what can be made our of them.

I do think back,' Mom told me, 'on my wonderful headmistress at Brearly, the one who told us we could have everything we wanted.... And then, years later, I went back for a reunion, and I told the headmistress that I, indeed, managed to have it all--a husband, a career, three children--but that I was tired all the time, exhausted in fact. And she said, 'Oh, dear--did I forget to mention that you can, indeed, have it all, but you need a lot of help!

The day's passage was by Ralph Waldo Emerson. It read: That which befits us, embosomed in beauty and wonder as we are, is cheerfulness, and courage, and the endeavor to realize our aspirations. Shall not the heart which has received so much, trust the Power by which it lives? May it not quit other leadings, and listen to the Soul that has guided it so gently, and taught it so much, secure that the future will be worthy of the past?

She felt whatever emotions she felt, but feeling was never a useful substitute for doing, and she never let the former get in the way of the latter. If anything, she used her emotions to motivate her and help her concentrate. The emphasis for her was always on doing what needed to be done.

the apartment is an oasis - of civility, kindness, and elegance.

We were terrified to stop, stop anything, and admit that something was wrong. Activity, frenzied activity, seemed to be the thing we all felt we needed. Only Dad slowed down, and that wasn't until he was trapped in a hospital getting intravenous antibiotics. Everything would be all right, everything would be possible, anything could be salvaged or averted, as long as we all kept running around.

Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio W. H. Auden, "Musée des Beaux Arts," from Collected Poems Jane Austen Russell Banks, Continental Drift Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, translated by Alison Anderson Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader The Holy Bible Elizabeth Bishop Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives, translated by Natasha Wimmer

Were you sad to leave Cambridge?" I asked her. She was, she said. Very sad. But she was also looking forward to being back in New York. "The world is complicated," she added. "You don't have to have one emotion at a time.

But it's one thing to feel that a book can speak beyond its particular time and place to something universal, and another to ignore the circumstances and time in or about which it was written.

He's also able to accept death. He's not happy about it, but he's perfectly calm. When I stop all this treatment, it will be because it's time to stop.

I realized then that for all of us part of the process of mom's dying was mourning, not just her death, but also the death of our dreams of things to come. You don't really lose the person who has been.

There's never a good excuse for not doing anything—

I particularly like that last phrase," Mom said. "About protecting your own happiness.

In Gilead, the narrator's friend's son describes himself not as an atheist but in "state of categorical unbelief." He says, "I don't even believe God doesn't exist, if you see what I mean." I pointed this passage out to Mom and said it closely matched my own views--I just didn't think about religion.