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.

If our family was an airline, Mom was the hub and we were the spokes. You rarely went anywhere nonstop you went via Mom, who directed the traffic flow and determined the priorities: which family member was cleared for takeoff or landing. Even my father was not immune to Mom's scheduling, though he was given more leeway than the rest of us.

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.

If I'd waited until I was well rested to read, I never would have read anything.

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.

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.

The greatest gift you can give anyone is your undivided attention.

Evil almost always starts with small cruelties.

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

You can truly miss characters. Not like you miss people, but you can still miss them.

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.

But it takes so little to help people, and people really do help each other, even people with very little themselves. And it’s not just about second chances. Most people deserve an endless number of chances.

Reading isn't the opposite of doing, it's the opposite of dying.

And my first item on each day's list is this: Wake up. If I can check that off, I've already done something and can get on with the business of living and trying to honor the memory of those I love who are no longer here.

We all have a lot more to read than we can read and a lot more to do than we can do.

In an idealized world, we would all be able to do what our English teachers told us to do, which is to write beautiful prose where enthusiasm is conveyed by word choice and grammar.