Adults forty-five years or older who sleep fewer than six hours a night are 200 percent more likely to have a heart attack or stroke during their life, as compared with those sleeping seven to eight hours a night.

"I had been to visitations before and have been to many since and I've come to understand that there's a good deal of value in the ritual accompanying death. It's hard to say good-bye and almost impossible to accomplish this alone and ritual is the railing we hold to, all of us together, that keeps us upright and connected until the worst is past."

"Interlibrary loans are a wonder of the world and a glory of civilization.

"Libraries really are wonderful. They're better than bookshops, even. I mean bookshops make a profit on selling you books, but libraries just sit there lending you books quietly out of the goodness of their hearts."

About being with her mother near the end of life: "To abide means to stand with someone, to suffer alongside someone. But it also means to live somewhere, and for me, abiding meant to live in that tender and tenuous place of knowing but not knowing. Knowing what would happen but not how it would happen. Knowing it would all end, but not what that ending would be like or how it would feel."

"If you cannot read all your books at any rate handle, or, as it were, fondle them peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on their shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that if you do not know what is in them, you will at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them at any rate be your acquaintances."

One of my favorites that I have recommended several times. A powerful story of profound miscommunication between cultures.

One of my favorite literary lines ... ever ... "There'll be no butter in hell!"