“When a man's stories are remembered, then he is immortal.”
“Dreams are what keep a man going.”
“The ending is always a surprise.”
“This is what is meant by last words: they are keys to unlock the afterlife. They're not last words but passwords, and as soon as they're spoken you can go.”
“You’re not necessarily supposed to believe it…You’re just supposed to believe in it.”
“Remembering a man's stories makes him immortal.”
“In the land of the dying, sentences go unfinished, you know how they're going to end.”
“He believed the stars were wishes, and that one day they would all come true.”
“We all have stories, just as you do. Ways in which he touched us, helped us, gave us money, sold it to us wholesale. Lots of stories, big and small. They all add up. Over a lifetime it all adds up. That's why we're here, William. We're a a part of him, who he is, just as he is a part of us. You still don't understand, do you?"
I didn't. But as I stared at the man and he stared back at me, in my father's dream I remembered where we'd met before.
"And what did my father do for you?" I asked him, and the old man smiled.
"He made me laugh," he said.”
“People were so cheap there... they ate beans to save on bubble bath.”
“What is it you say now, what peace is there to be made in the last minutes of the last day that will mark the before and after of your life until then, the day that will change everything for both of you, the living and the dead?”
“I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. He’s lived his whole life like a turtle, within an emotional carapace that makes for the perfect defense: there’s absolutely no way in. My hope is that in these last moments he’ll show me the vulnerable and tender underbelly of his self, but this isn’t happening, yet, and I’m a fool to think that it will. This is the way it has gone from the beginning: every time we get close to something meaningful, serious, or delicate, he tells a joke. There is a never a yes or no, what do you think, here, according to me, is the meaning of life. “Why”
“Still,” he says, “if I shared my doubts with you, about God and love and life and death, that’s all you’d have: a bunch of doubts. But now, see, you’ve got all these great jokes.” “They’re”
“The day Edward Bloom was born, it rained.”
“How can the world be seen at such speeds? Where do people need to go so badly they can't realize what is already here, outside the car window?”
“This is what is meant by last words: they are keys to unlock the afterlife. They’re not last words but passwords, and as soon as they’re spoken you can go.”
“Dying, he has that look dying people get in their eyes sometimes, happy and sad, tired and spiritually blessed, all at the same time.”
“You are a good dad,” I say. “Thanks,” he says, and his eyelids flutter a bit, as if he’s heard what he’s come to hear. This is what is meant by last words: they are keys to unlock the afterlife. They’re not last words but passwords, and as soon as they’re spoken you can go. “So.”
“He thought she hung the moon. He actually believed this from time to time. He believed the moon wouldn’t have been there but that she’d hung it. He believed the stars were wishes, and that one day they would all come true. For her, his daughter. He had told her this when she was little to make her happy, and now that he was old he believed it, because it made him happy and because he was so very old. He”
“I'd caught him at a bad time in his life. And this was no fault of his own. It was simply that the world no longer held the magic that allowed
him to live grandly within it.”
“My father is on the roof. This is how I remember him sometimes. Well-dressed in a dark suit and shiny, slippery shoes, he is looking left, looking right, looking as far as his eyes will travel. Then, looking down, he sees me, and just as he begins to fall he smiles, and winks. All the way down he's looking at me–smiling, mysterious, mythic, an unknown quantity: my dad.”
“The car is my father's magic carpet. Not only does it get him places, but it shows him places.”
“...because in my mind—in the memory that has lodged itself imperturbably in my mind, my father resembles Abraham Lincoln, a man with long arms and deep pockets and dark eyes...”
“He was a big fish, even then.”
“This wasn't life, of course. This was life support. This was what the medical world had fashioned to take the place of Purgatory.”
“...I'm not laughing. I'm not laughing at all. I'm doing the other thing.”
“I look into his gray-blue dying eyes. We’re staring at each other, showing each other our last looks, the faces we’ll take with us into eternity, and I’m thinking how I wish I knew him better, how I wish we’d had a life together, wishing my father wasn’t such a complete and utter goddamn mystery to me...”
“All of a sudden my arms were full of the most fantastic life, frenetic, impossible to hold on to even if I’d wanted to, and I wanted to. But then all I was holding was the blanket, because my father had jumped into the river. And that’s when I discovered my father hadn’t been dying after all. He was changing, transforming himself into something new and different to carry his life forward.”
“Being alone was lonely, but there was an even greater loneliness sometimes when he was surrounded by a lot of other people who were constantly making demands of him. He needed a break. C”
“So in a way it was true: as I grew, he shrank. And by this logic one day I would become a giant, and Edward would become nothing, invisible in the world. B”
“Lord Maccon looked up. “Grovel, you say?”
Lyall did not glance away from the latest vampire report he was perusing. “Grovel, my lord.”
“He places his hands over mine, the feeling so warm and familiar. 'Those days back there, in the house. That is my world. That is my truth,' he says. 'That is my ocean.”
“One who has loved truly, can never lose entirely. Love is whimsical and temperamental. Its nature is ephemeral, and transitory. It comes when it pleases,and goes away without warning. Accept and enjoy it while it remains, but spend no time worrying about its departure. Worry will never bring it back.”
“For any true stickler, you see, the sight of the plural word “Book’s” with an apostrophe in it will trigger a ghastly private emotional process similar to the stages of bereavement, though greatly accelerated. First there is shock. Within seconds, shock gives way to disbelief, disbelief to pain, and pain to anger. Finally (and this is where the analogy breaks down), anger gives way to a righteous urge to perpetrate an act of criminal damage with the aid of a permanent marker.”
“You're awfully small to be so hugely irritating.”
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