Quotes from Will Schwalbe

a pamphlet that she'd been handed when she was visiting an African country where people were able to vote freely for the first time. The pamphlet was called The Ten Commandments for Voters,

1. You have nothing to fear. Remember that your vote is secret. Only you and your God know how you vote. 2. People who promise things that they never give are like clouds and wind that bring no rain: do not be misled by promises. 3. Your vote is your power: use it to make a difference to your life and your country.

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

You can leave the books that you don't like alone, and let other people read them- ancient scholar Yuan Chunglang

Reading isn't the opposite of doing; it's the opposite of dying

Lahiri's characters, just like people all around us, are constantly telling each other important things, but not necessarily in words.

What does one say to someone who has just been diagnosed with such a dire illness?

Every year pancreatic cancer kills more than 35,000 people in America—it's the fourth leading cause of cancer death.

He remains for my family the perfect model of how you can be gone but ever present in the lives of people who loved you, in the same way that your favorite books stay with you for your entire life, no matter how long it's been since you turned the last page.

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. So I like to ask; How is this book changing mine?

You can die now, with three healthy children, your husband of almost fifty years alive and well, and five grandchildren whom you love and who love you, all well, all happy'—well, I think Mom would have thought that wasn't a bad deal.

Kokoro, a remarkable novel by Natsume Soseki,

We had chosen as our next book club selection Jhumpa Lahiri's new collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, as we'd both loved her 2003 novel The Namesake and her first book of stories, Interpreter of Maladies, which had won the Pulitzer in 1999.

I gave people who didn't know what to say the best advice I could muster, which was that it was better to say anything rather than pretend that nothing was wrong.

Hidden away, the people of the streets drift into sleep induced by alcohol or agitated by despair, into dreams that carry them back to the lives that once were theirs.

Why didn't this one say this, or tell someone that, or let anyone know she or he was so unhappy, so lonely, so scared? Lahiri's characters, just like people all around us, are constantly telling each other important things, but not necessarily in words. WHEN

Felicia's Journey by the Irish short-story writer and novelist William Trevor.

How can you be lonely, Mom said, when there are always people who want to share their stories with you, to tell you about their lives and families and dreams and plans?

The Uncommon Reader, a novella by Alan Bennett

The Price of Salt, by Patricia Highsmith

A Thousand Splendid Suns, the new book by Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner.

And more than anything, we are a pretty awkward society when it comes to talking about dying. It's supposed to happen offstage, in hospitals, and no one wants to dwell on it too much.

Every hospital is, as I've noted, an interruption machine—a flood of people come to poke you and prod you and ask you questions.

life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death." I