Gone Before Goodbye

by Reese Witherspoon

“Be regular and orderly in your life, so you may be violent and original in your work.”

“Enjoy the smaller moments,” her father had often told her. “That’s where life is lived.”

“The problem is, you can’t go back. You can try. But human nature never lets you. Wherever you are, that becomes ground zero. Greed is not ‘I need more’—it’s the fear of losing what you already have. Of going back. So you hold on tighter and keep trying to climb up. Because that’s the only way you can go. Life won’t let you stand still. You are either on your way up or you’re on your way down. And you’ll do anything not to go down.” “That,” Maggie says, “sounds like the very definition of greed.”

“When one man dies, a whole universe dies,” and while the implications are obvious—the death of even a single soul is like destroying a world, that human life has profound value—dying is also routine, mundane, almost tedious.

Life is always a high school cafeteria.

“‘Portmanteau’ was on my New-Word-A-Day calendar last month.” “I figured.” “It means a word blending the sound and combining the meaning of two other words.”

“Part of the human condition is that we all think that we are uniquely complex—no one knows what we are really thinking, what we are capable of—and yet we are convinced we can read other people. We think that we know what’s going on inside others, what they are really feeling or experiencing or thinking, but they can’t tell the same about us. That’s obviously impossible.