“You can take my heart, you can take my breath when you pry it from my cold, dead chest.”

“You can take my heart, you can take my breath when you pry it from my cold, dead chest.”

“Now that it's over, I just wanna hold herI'd give up all the world to see That little piece of heaven looking back at me.Now that it's over, I just wanna hold her.I've gotta live with the choices I've madeAnd I can't live with myself today.”

“Every single dayI find it hard to sayI could be yours aloneYou will see somedayThat all along the wayI was yours to hold.”

“This heart belongs to you alone.”

“I'm going to treat myself to one of these as a reward for not knocking himself unconscious with a skillet.”

“On Sundays Mom invariably ran out of money, which is when she cracked eggs into the skillet over cubes of fried black sourdough bread. It was, I think, the most delicious and eloquent expression of pauperism.”

“This world rubs me raw, scours me smooth like an SOS pad put to a grease-caked skillet. And pain: it stabs and scrapes and pulls me back to earth, my final B&B, that worm-spun cot of cool black sod.”

“America, it has been observed, is not really a melting pot. It is actually a huge potluck dinner, in which platters of roasted chicken beckon beside casseroles of pasta, mounds of tortillas, stew pots of gumbo, and skillets filled with pilafs of every imaginable color.”

“Das mine!' protested Ava, Bennie's daughter, affirming Alex's recent theory that language acquisition involved a phase of speaking German. She snatched a plastic skillet away from his own daughter, Cara-Ann, who lurched after it, roaring, 'Mine pot! Mine pot!”

“Each day when you wake up you have a choice: You can have a good day, or you can have a bad day. So you might as well have a good one.”