“The first step to regain control of time is to decide what activities are most important so that we can plan to give them the proper priority during a day or a week or a month. ”
″‘When I told you your mama took everything with her, I forgot one thing, one very important thing she left behind.’
‘What?’ I asked.
‘You,’ he said. ‘Thank God your mama left me you.‘”
“Straight lines, even edges. People don’t shovel snow that way anymore. Nowadays they just clear a way, they use snow blowers and all sorts of things. Any old method will do, scattering snow all over the place. As if that were the only thing that mattered in life: pushing one’s way forward.”
“But in the end I managed it, and the instant I saw her again, at that recovery centre in Dover, all our differences—while they didn’t exactly vanish—seemed not nearly as important as all the other things.”
“I’ll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.”
“You’re both the fire and the water that extinguishes it. You’re the narrator, the protagonist, and the sidekick. You’re the storyteller and the story told. You are somebody’s something, but you are also your you.”
“The key to a good life is this: If you’re not going to talk about something during the last hour of your life, then don’t make it a top priority during your lifetime.”
“But when he finally reached the pinnacle, his trophy ran like water through his fingers, and only then had he realized what was really important to him. Too late. Much too late.”
“Computers were all outside the body. They carried them around outside of them, in their hands, like if you carried your lungs in a briefcase and opened it to breathe.”
“Time is against her, but she takes some of it anyway, carefully selecting Daisy-brand pumps with a blue leather flower on a clear plastic throat, as if the choice is of utmost importance. And it is. The Daisys will be the insurgency she brings off tonight, and every night.”
Calonice: “And you, Lysistrata. What’s bothering you? Don’t frown, child. Knitted brows don’t become you.”
Lysistrata: “But my heart’s on fire, Calonice, and I’m terribly annoyed about us women. You know, according to the men we’re capable of any sort of mischief—”
Calonice: “And so we surely are!”
Lysistrata: “But when they’re told to meet us here to discuss a matter of no trifling importance, they sleep in and don’t show up.”
“My life . . . in America had led me to feel . . . that the problem of human unity was more important than bread, more important than physical living itself.”
“What matters to you is not necessarily what you say or believe, but what your actions and reactions reveal as important and serious to you…If small things have the power to disturb you, then who you think you are is exactly that: small. That will be your unconscious belief.”
“Everything in Binn, depends on our Patrol Cats. They are more important than our army, our navy, and our fire department too, for they keep the Nizzards away from the Dike Trees, and the Dike Trees keep the ocean back out of our land.”
“As a squire, your first duty is to your knight’s armor. Your knight’s armor is more important than your own life. If you damage or mislay a single piece of your knight’s armor, I will personally damage or mislay a piece of you. And I mean that from the bottom of my heart.”
“How many have laid waster to your life when you weren’t aware of what you were losing, how much was wasted in pointless grief, foolish joy, greedy desire, and social amusements-how little of your own was left to you. You will realize you are dying before your time!”