How could I have ever been ashamed of loving Dante Quintana?

The summer sun was not meant for boys like me. Boys like me belonged to the rain.

Another secret of the universe: Sometimes pain was like a storm that came out of nowhere. The clearest summer could end in a downpour. Could end in lightning and thunder.

I wondered if my smile was as big as hers. Maybe as big. But not as beautiful.

Water was something he loved, something he respected. He understood its beauty and its dangers. He talked about swimming as if it were a way of life.

I bet you could sometimes find all the mysteries of the universe in someone's hand.

The day he came home from the hospital, he cried. I held him. I thought he would never stop.I knew that a part of him would never be the same.They cracked more than his ribs.

You can’t expect to go both ways when you’re driving on a one-way street.

It started to rain and we just sat. Sat and watched the rain in silence.

Everyone was always becoming someone else.Sometimes, when you were older, you became someone younger. And me, I felt old. How can aguy who’s about to turn seventeen feel old?

I was getting an A for work. But not for talent. The story of my life.

At the end of the night awaits the white morning: showered in sunlight.

Oh, sometimes I like to put the sand of doubt into the oyster of my faith." (Br. Cadfael)

You have only one true friend: that’s YOU!

I can see the beauty of glass objects fully at the moment when they slip from my hand

We forgive and forget. At least I forgive and he forgets.

It is in Zen practice that you gain power, balance and wisdom. The battles that you fight are within your own mind. That is where the real victories and defeats are.

Make it compulsory for a doctor using a brass plate to have inscribed on it, in addition to the letters indicating his qualifications, the words 'Remember that I too am mortal'.

I can critique the bad; I can take the good, and I can add whatever I want.

There is a little plant called reverence in the corner of my soul's garden, which I love to have watered once a week.

The deeper the experience of the free grace of God, the more generous we must become.