Quotes from Will Schwalbe

Mom would often talk about a refugee boy she'd met in a hospital in Afghanistan. He was the victim of a land mine and had lost a leg. She said to him that she brought greetings to him from schoolchildren in New York. "Tell them not to worry about me," this little boy told her from his hospital bed. "I still have one leg.

The thing about Americans," she said, "is that you're very concerned about everything all the time.

His point: you don't have to travel the world to see the ways we mistreat one another; it's as close as the street outside our windows.

When I think back on all the refugee camps I visited, all over the world, the people always asked for the same thing: books. Sometimes even before medicine or shelter--they wanted books for their children. (quoting his mother)

Why did I always need to do something, like referring one person to another, just for the sake of doing something, when sometimes, perhaps, it was better to do nothing?

That's one of the things books do. They help us talk. But they also give us something we all can talk about when we don't want to talk about ourselves.

That there's great joy in thanking.

joy is a product not of whether characters live or die but of what they've realized and achieved, or how they are remembered.

Loneliness is the price we have to pay for being born in this modern world, so full of freedom, independence and our own egotistical selves.

I can't see giving up real books," she said. "And I love that I can give away my books after I've read them. Think of the first edition of The Magic Mountain I'm giving Nico. It was printed along with the first copy that went to Mann himself. It's got a history.

The world is complicated," she added. "You don't have to have one emotion at a time.

I become influenced while I'm reading. I'm not the same reader when I finish a book as I was when I started. Brains are tangles of pathways, and reading creates new ones. Every book changes your life.

He starts to whisper a prayer. "Whatever beings there are, may they be free from suffering. Whatever beings there are, may they be free from enmity. Whatever beings there are, may they be free from hurtfulness. Whatever beings there are, may they be free from ill health. Whatever beings there are, may they be able to protect their own happiness.

Mom went on to tell me, as we sat there, that she really believed your personal life was personal. Secrets, she felt, rarely explained or excused anything in real life, or were even all that interesting. People shared too much, she said, not too little. She thought you should be able to keep your private life private for any reason or for no reason.

MOM LIKED THE Ritalin. And she found it had a terrific and unexpected side effect—it helped her read. The day she first tried it, she was tired and uncomfortable and having trouble concentrating. She popped the Ritalin right before she sat down with Thomas Mann's Joseph and His Brothers, a fifteen-hundred-page book that she'd been attempting to read after a friend gave it to her.

all over the world, the people always asked for the same thing: books. Sometimes even before medicine or shelter—they wanted books for their children.

How does a doctor tell you that it's over, that there are things they could do but probably shouldn't, and that if your aim is quality of life and not quantity of life, there simply are no good next treatments?

I was learning that when you're with someone who is dying, you may need to celebrate the past, live the present, and mourn the future all at the same time. Yet

That day at chemo, we talked once more about the ending of The Reluctant Fundamentalist. "I just really want to know which character dies. I've read the ending again and again," I said. "I hate not knowing." "I do too. That's why I always read endings first. But sometimes you just can't know what's going to happen, even when you know everything there is to know. So you prepare for the worst but hope for the best.

And a piece of advice that she thought was one of the most important things she wanted to pass on: You should tell your family every day that you love them. And make sure they know that you're proud of them too.

What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation?" It helped you remember that people aren't here for you; everyone is here for one another.

did manage to read some pages from a book that's also about how people can find strength they didn't know they had." "What book was that?" "The Book of Common Prayer," Mom answered. "Didion?" "No, Will." Mom's voice was somewhere between amused and exasperated. "The other one." And then she added, smiling: "Besides, I think the Didion is A Book of Common Prayer, not 'The Book.'

I did manage to read some pages from a book that's also about how people can find strength they didn't know they had." "What book was that?" "The Book of Common Prayer," Mom answered. "Didion?" "No, Will." Mom's voice was somewhere between amused and exasperated. "The other one." And then she added, smiling: "Besides, I think the Didion is A Book of Common Prayer, not 'The Book.'

This was not even a particularly big offense in the pantheon of book club crimes, where the worst sin one could commit was not to read the book in question--or, even worse, to lie about having read the book when, in fact, you'd simply seen the movie, a lie usually uncovered when you used the actor's name by accident. ("I love the part where Daniel Day-Lewis ...")