We all lose people. We all have to live in the aftermath. It’s how we move forward that counts, but sometimes we are tethered to something in our past that won’t let us move forward.

I’m clinging to one last thought: pain is the harbinger of hope. You have to be alive to feel pain. If you are alive, then you have purpose. If you have purpose, then you have hope.

In total this journey will take five flights and fifty-five hours, but in reality it began four decades and two generations ago when my uncle died in Vietnam.

I felt so much pride, so much love. You get a handful of days like this in a lifetime. Take in every minute. They’ll be over soon enough, and you never know what tomorrow will bring.

A son for a flag is a lot of sacrifice.

The meeting began well, meaning it had the potential for being short.

I felt like I should salute. If only I knew how.

Military life is hard, even cruel—especially for the kids.

This is who I was, before I was dead. When I cared, when I was relentless.

We could never go back to how things were on the day before 9/11, but maybe I could go back to who I was.

I stood with my mom in the cemetery. She felt terrible pain. My grandmother is with God. My mom has to continue living. It’s not so easy, moving forward.

I am not a broken heart, and I am not your fault.

The funnest jokes for me to tell are the ones that are the newest. So I'm just constantly motivated to keep my eyes and ears open and have new stuff.

I began like all composers, writing for small groups. Chamber groups.

The economics of baseball are the big problem. The big clubs make a lot of money and the little clubs don't.

If a fish were an anthropologist, the last thing it would discover would be water.

There’s no such thing as ready,” she says. “There’s only willing.

All penguins are the same below the surface, which I think is as perfect an analogy as we're likely to get for the futility of racism.

Usually kids who are talented have the brashness to think they can do anything, but they don't often get the chance to see how close they can come.

Just as a wise man can say something foolish, a fool can say something wise.

Death is my son-in-law. Death is my heir. My daughter he hath wedded. I will die, And leave him all. Life, living, all is Death’s.