The way children stretch time and the way adults forget that stretch could be one of the saddest differences in the world.

Days are a finite resource and it's best to protect the ones you have.

He preferred smart questions to smart answers.

Their faith in him is at once touching and alarming -- their trust that they are safe simply because he's with them, as if an adult presence warded of all possible threat, emanated an unbreachable forcefield.

I began to think that he had just the right measure of unhappiness and dissatisfaction with life to be someone I could get along with.

And I knew that it was possible he wasn't entirely right for me, but I also knew, in some way, that probably no one was right for me and potentially no one was right for anyone, but I also felt, with uncharacteristic sincerity, that we were as right for each other as any two people could manage.