“I have a stubborn stamina and the joke about me at work is that I’m relentless. Not a prick, not a micromanager, not personally critical, just staying there are all night to play with the words one more time. I know I can be exhausting. If you come to my funeral, tell ‘em I’m sorry.”

“Like all authentic moments, I could only feel it afterwards.”

“What is it like to have your body betray you? We will all find out. The neurons misfire, the synapses don’t click. The auto-immune response of dying of old age — depression, loss of hearing, unsteady legs. Sooner or later, life shows its claws. We all fail. There is a 100 percent mortality rate for [...]

“My fellow managers are rooting for me to fire one of our reporters. I want to throttle him, too, sometimes, but I see something in him. I can talk him from this cliff, but nobody wants me to. I don’t know. No lesson is learned if we just can him as our first move. Just [...]

“We all do our best, I think. We all miss the mark. We get points for getting up each day, trying hard, mostly being kind to each other, knowing what’s coming in the end.”

“In 1960, when I was eight, the Yanks lost the seventh game in the World Series to the Pirates and I was such a weeping basket case, they thought they’d have to take me to a doctor. My parents kept telling me, ‘Mickey Mantle’s not crying.’ I found out years later that he was bawling [...]

“It’s not the answers that matter. It’s the questions.”

“We all have worth beyond our economic usefulness. Who says so? That’s when I call on a God with no name and no face and no promise of heaven. Who is rooting for us. Who is One with all we are. Who is as complex as Life. Who respects the laws of nature and science [...]

“Telling people’s stories was a way of finding out about my own. It was one of the few ways I could feel some transcendent force of life some people call God. I hope I get to do it again.”

“May I have the guts to feel it all.”