Written with passion, honesty, humor, and a stubborn, rebellious optimism, Dear Marcus is like nothing I've ever read. When a bullet in the back told Jerry McGill not to go on, Jerry went on-smiling.

Roads are no place for naive chickens dreaming of nirvana.

Anger and depression are not diseases or dysfunctions or anomalies; they are perfectly rational responses to the myriad avoidable disappointments that begin in a thoroughly irrational hope.

...the greatest source of misery in the world, the greatest cause of anguish and hatred and sadness and death, was neither disease nor race nor religion. It was hope.

My point is that death is more tragic than life, than any life, because every life has hope of some kind.

Kugel was a firm believer that death was not always a bad thing - that life often reached such levels of crapitude that dying was preferable to living.

Expecting hell, we're ill prepared for heaven.

Sages tell us that the Torah tells us that until the age of thirteen, all of boy's sins are ascribed to his father.

So desperate was Kugel for things to turn out for the best, proclaimed Professor Jove, that he couldn't stop worrying about the worst. Hope, said Professor Jove, was Solomon Kugel's greatest failing.

To live by worry is to live against reality

You… are the symbol of the revolution that will transform Aryavarta

We need to get acquainted with mediocrity to notice greatness.

In a world of increasing uncertainty, expect...

Ten soldiers wisely led will beat a hundred without a head.

Any time the president talks, you listen.

I admire people who know they can't sing. There are so many people out there who can't sing, but they think they can, so they sing a lot.

Nothing whatsoever is worth the cost of a contracted heart.

I don't want to come off like the jealous brother who wasn't getting the attention, but it was like no one was really into me anyway. I wasn't really a priority.

Meredith Baxter Birney gets beaten by a rod, in the Lifetime Original, Rod.