51 Quotes by Bill Clegg

Rough as life can be, I know in my bones we are supposed to stick around and play our part. Even if that part is coughing to death from cigarettes... Or maybe someone you won’t see coming will need you... And good people might even ask you to marry them... I don’t think we get to know why.

Mimi and I don’t speak a word to each other. Not out of anger or punishment, but we’ve learned that grief can sometimes get loud, and when it does, we try not to speak over it.

Some trees love an ax, a drunk old-timer mumbled one night at the Tap, back when she still went there, and something in what he said rang true, but when she later remembered what he’d said, she disagreed and though instead that the tree gets used to the ax, which has nothing to do with love. It settles into being chipped away at, bit by bit, blade by blade, until it doesn’t feel anything anymore, and then, because nothing else can happen, what’s left crumbles to dust.

And it might be you never know the part you played, what it meant to someone to watch you make your way each day.

If you want to lose sleep at night and eliminate all your free time or freedom, by all means open a small business, especially one that serves food.

Why is it only later that things begin to make sense?

When you see someone every day for a while, you settle into a rhythm and you come to count on them even if for nothing more than the fifteen minutes each morning they spend sitting at your counter, on one of your stools, talking about the weather and giving you a big smile and thumbs-up when they sink their teeth into a poppy-seed muffin.

All we can do is play our parts and keep each other company.

Some people, she decided, magically surface in these horrible moments knowing exactly what to do, which spaces to fill.