Left on Tenth Quotes

“Giving with no expectation of a return is the only way to give,” he said. That is, of course, the absolute truth, although I had not thought of it before.”
― Delia Ephron, Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life

“The silence in the apartment is loud.”
― Delia Ephron, Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life

“dogs dig deep into your heart. They’re in the room, on the floor, in your lap, on the bed, pestering you for treats, chewing your sock, burrowing under sheets, making you laugh, following you about, eating the cheese you left on the table, tearing in wild happy circles after baths. They trust. They are innocence. They are unjudgmental observers of your every unguarded moment.”
― Delia Ephron, Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life

“No one can truly know the answer to the question, What will you do when you lose the person you love?”
― Delia Ephron, Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life

“Now he wasn’t going to be here to love me or to talk to me. To have conversations with me about everything. Stuff. What was on his mind.”
― Delia Ephron, Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life

“realize I hate the word widow. It’s sexless. I’m never using it again.)”
― Delia Ephron, Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life

“We don’t discuss death. Not that we avoid it. It’s just that here, we’re preoccupied with life.”
― Delia Ephron, Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life

“He was my true home. My first safe place.”
― Delia Ephron, Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life

“This visit is a bit of the same, and the same feels precious and fleeting.”
― Delia Ephron, Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life

“All these different friendships. Mine with Eugene is both business and personal. These bonds matter. They are little homes. Places of safety. I am taking stock now. Friendship. God, I love my friends.”
― Delia Ephron, Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life

“Conversation, friendship, laughter, and understanding are my favorite sports,”
― Delia Ephron, Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life

“The anatomy of what happens to each of us is shadowed and affected by what came before, and I was conditioned as a child to live with fear and worry.”
― Delia Ephron, Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life

“I believe doctors rarely have any idea how helpless patients can be when their brains are jumbled by fear, how unable they are to respond or take information in.”
― Delia Ephron, Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances. If there is any reaction, both are transformed.”
― Delia Ephron, Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life

“And one single thing about all this: We were both seventy-two and age meant nothing. We were getting as loopy, as obsessed with each other as anyone falling under the spell of romance.”
― Delia Ephron, Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life

“There is a rule I live by: People begin as they mean to continue.”
― Delia Ephron, Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life

“Writing taught me who I was, because your writing is your fingerprint”
― Delia Ephron, Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life

“men I could ever be interested in, writers and shrinks. Because they both have emotional curiosity. This”
― Delia Ephron, Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life

“am someone who needs to adjust to everything.”
― Delia Ephron, Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life

“knowing (in her gone-ness that will always be part of me) that she would wish me to go ahead and find out what this is. I believe our hearts will tell us how to do this. P”
― Delia Ephron, Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life

“And maybe he had more room for me in his heart.”
― Delia Ephron, Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life

“Jessie has a kind of spirituality; it’s part of her wisdom. If she says, “You’re going to be all right,” it seems as if she must know that, that she’s in touch with spirits from somewhere or other. She has a simple beauty like she’s someone from the prairie, but she was raised in Southern California. She’s full of charming contradictions: earthy and spiritual, compassionate and tough. More than anything, I believe, Jessie is someone everyone tells their secrets to.”
― Delia Ephron, Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life

“There we were, me and Honey. It wasn’t France, but it was somehow fine.”
― Delia Ephron, Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life

“People begin as they mean to continue.”
― Delia Ephron, Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life

“Richard still calls me “darling” in a heart-melting way. He tells me I’m brave to fall in love again and urges me on in my writing as he always does.”
― Delia Ephron, Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life

“Julia has his pills on a timer, and every so often its bell goes off, startling us all, and Julia rushes to get the pills. God, illness is such an interference, and yet Richard’s brain is as sharp as ever.”
― Delia Ephron, Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life

“The kitchen, dining room, and living room are mixed up together in a snuggly way, always warmed by the fireplace and the Aga. Peter has never seen an Aga, this gigantic iron cooking invention. I get to explain to him how it works, that the ovens and circular metal iron-topped grills are always on. I show him that you switch a pan from a high-heat grill to a low-heat one and control the cooking that way. It’s like knowing a foreign language.”
― Delia Ephron, Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life

“Parkinson’s is a wicked illness, slowly diluting his ability to be in the world. His voice is faint, his gait unsteady, but he is, as always, charming, smart, and, most of all, interested in other people.”
― Delia Ephron, Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life

“I’ve gotten to make my living by my imagination. That’s a lovely thing.”
― Delia Ephron, Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life

“she was pregnant. Life could still hand out prizes.”
― Delia Ephron, Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life