Businesspeople From The United States

"...I said everything that matters... Don't take my advice. Or anyone's advice. Trust yourself. For good or for bad, happy or unhappy, it's your life, and what you do with it has always been entirely up to you."

"I sometimes think to myself that I’m the last of my kind."

"His voice, even now, follows me everywhere on this longest of rides, this thing called life."

"My marriage brought great happiness into my life, but lately there's been nothing but sadness. I understand that love and tragedy go hand in hand, for there can't be one without the other, but nonetheless I find myself wondering whether the tradeoff is fair. A man should die as he had lived, I think; in his final moments, he should be surrounded and comforted by those he's always loved."

"You are a smart man, Ira, but sometimes I think you do not understand women very well."

"I was not meant to be alone. I am not good at it. The years since Ruth's passing have ticked by with the kind of desparate silence known only to the elderly. It is a silence underscored by loneliness and the knowledge that the good years are already in the past, coupled with the complications of old age itself.The body is not meant to survive nearly a century. I speak from experience when I say this..."

"But trust me when I say that memories are funny things. Sometimes they're real, but other times they change into what we want them to be... But like I said, she's hurting, and if there's one thing I've learned, it's that people in pain don't always see things as clearly as they should... And if it somehow doesn't work out between you, then you've got to understand that you can't look back anymore. It'll destroy you in the end, and destroy her as well. Neither one of you can keep living with regret, because it drains the life right out of you, and the very idea is enough to break my heart."

"...there'd also been an unvarnished honestly in what they'd said. There were no hidden meanings, no secret attempts to pass judgment; as quickly as their disagreements had flared up, they'd pass."

"Love, after all, always said more about those who felt it than it did about the ones they loved."

"The past was gone, after all, and the future was the only thing they had left."

"...he had the sense that they were both lonely, albeit in different ways. He was a solitary figure in a vast landscape while she was a face in a nameless crowd."

"In the end, everything came down to money. It came down to what a person actually did, as opposed to who they thought they were,..."

"It was a life, she eventually concluded, that had been lived in the middle ground, where contentment and love were found in the smallest details of people's lives. It was a life of dignity and honor, not without sorrows yet fulfilling in a way that few experiences ever were. She knew Tuck understood that more than anyone."

"...the grass isn't always greener on the other side. What the younger generation didn't understand was that the grass was greener where it's watered, which meant that both Frank and Amanda had to get out their hoses if they wanted to make things better."

"Dying is a strange business, and I'm not going to bore you with the details. I might have weeks or I might have months and though it's a cliche, it's true that so many of the things I once believed to be important no longer are. ...I find myself reflecting on the essential moments of my life."

"Katie eventually realizes that she must choose between a life of transient safety and one of riskier rewards...and that in the darkest hour, love is the only true safe haven."

"...even then I knew that I was fortunate. Because you were the first guy who wasn't constantly trying to impress me. You accepted who you were, but more than that, you accepted me for me."

"He knew that Amanda would always be the very best part of him, the self he would always long to know."

"I just tell people what they already know but are afraid to admit to themselves."

"I'm not sure anyone's life turns out exactly the way they imagine. All we can do is to try to make the best of it. Even when it seems impossible."

"Love doesn't mean anything if you're not willing to make a commitment, and you have to think not only about what you want, but about what he wants. Not just now, but in the future."

"Maybe I don't want to be defined by what I do. Maybe I'd like to be defined by what I am."

"Long-term relationships--the ones that matter--are all about weathering the peaks and valleys."

"You have to understand that I'm not the girl I used to be. I'm a wife and a mother now, and like everyone else I'm not perfect. I struggle with the choices I've made and I make mistakes, and half the time I wonder who I really am or what I'm doing or whether my life means anything at all. I'm not special at all, Dawson, and you need to know that. You have to understand that I'm just...ordinary."

"...people who are grieving have to want to move on--that first step, that motivating spark, has to come from within them. And when it does, it opens the door to the unexpected."

"The past was gone and the future had yet to unfold, and he knew he should focus his life on the present...yet his day-to-day existence suddenly struck him as endless and unbearable."

"...He was with the woman and daughters he loved, and who could ever need or want anything more than that?...It was just a normal day, a day like any other. But most of all, it was a day in which everything was exactly the way it should be."

"He loved his wife but hated what life with her had become, cursing himself for even thinking this way."

"...There is a greater purpose to all this. It is your destiny."

"These days, it seemed that the only thing he was certain about was the knowledge that he wouldn't trade his years with Gabby for anything. Without her, his life had little meaning. He was a small-town husband with a small-town occupation and his cares were no different from anyone else's. He'd been neither a leader nor a follower, nor had he been someone who would be remembered long after he passed away. He was the most ordinary of men with only one exception: He'd fallen in love with a woman named Gabby, his love deepening in the years they'd been married. But fate had conspired to ruin all that, and now he spent long periods of his days wondering whether it was humanly possible to fix things between them."

"Marriage, each of them realized intuitively, was about compromise and forgiveness. It was about balance, where one person complemented the other."

"...she was struck by the simple truth that sometimes the most ordinary things could be made extraordinary, simply by doing them with the right people."

"You're doing the best you can, right? Isn't that what we always tell each other?"

"How far should a person go in the name of true love?"

"Thinking back, he recalled events he wished he could change, tears he wished had never been shed, time that could have been better spent, and frustrations he should have shrugged off. Life, it seemed, was full of regret, and he yearned to turn back the clock so he could live parts of his live over again. One thing was certain: He should have been a better husband."

"But would she do it differently if she could? She doubted it. Her experiences growing up ad formed her into the woman that she'd become, just as his experiences had formed him, and she didn't regret them. And yet...she knew that wasn't the question that mattered. ...she realized the choice before her was this: Where do I go from here? It is never too late to change things."

"...people always said that parenting and worrying were synonymous..."

"...he realized that the same thing that made women initially attractive to him--their need to be taken care of--was the very thing that eventually signaled he end of the relationship. How did that old saying go? If you've been divorced once, you might be right in thinking your ex was the problem. If you've been divorced three times? Well, folks, the problem is most definitely you. Granted, he hadn't been divorced, but the point was well taken."

"...he often wondered when exactly her feeling for him finally overwhelmed those she'd had for Kevin... He wasn't sure; capturing a specific instant like that was no more possible than locating a specific drop of water in the ocean."

"Life, he realized, was much like a song. In the beginning there is mystery, in the end there is confirmation, but it's in the middle where all the emotion resides to make the whole thing worthwhile."

"Finding a woman with a sense of humor had been the one piece of advice his father had given him when he'd first begun to get serious about dating, and he finally understood why his dad had considered it important. If conversation was the lyrics, laughter was the music, making time spent together a melody that could be replayed over and over without getting stale."

"But I'm different now than i was then. Just like I was different at the end of the trip than I'd been at the beginning. And I'll be different tomorrow than I am today. And what that means is that I can never replicate that trip. Even if I went to the same places and met the same people, it wouldn't be the same. My experience wouldn't be the same. To me, that's what traveling should be about. Meeting people, learning to not only appreciate a different culture, but really enjoy it like a local, following whatever impulse strikes you."

"'He who does nothing is the one who does nothing.'...'Blessed are the lazy who lie in boats, for they shall inherit a suntan.'"

"Traveling has less to do with seeing things than experiencing them...."

"...people are pretty much the same. Especially through adolescence and early adulthood. For the most part, people go through the same experiences and think the same thing, but somehow on one ever escapes the belief that his experience is unique in every conceivable way."

"He often felt that too many people lived their lives acting and pretending, wearing masks and losing themselves in the process."

"That was one of the great things about being single: A person could pretty much do what he wanted, whenever he wanted, and introspection was only an option."

"In other words, when the going get tough, the tough get going."

"Was living together a step toward the future or just a way to continue the present?"

"...he remembered being very happy. But things change. People change. Change was one of the inevitable laws of nature, exacting its toll on people's lives. Mistakes were made, regrets form, and all the was left were repercussions that made something as simple as rising from the bed seem almost laborious."