A kid is a terrible thing to be, in charge of nothing.

Growing up was bloody overrated. If I could have my time over again, I'd be more careful with it. I wouldn't let it slip thorugh my careless fingers like flour.

I know my father loves me, I know my mother does not. I know that I have to reap what I have sown, it's only fair. I am the mother of five children grown and gone in the blink of an eye. I am the sitting tenant of one farm, the wife to one husband, the fool to one lover. I have an empty nest, an empty lap, empty arms, a hollow heart.

Lose a person. Gain a ghost.

As I stared at him, I felt compelled to write his name on everything. On every blade of grass, on each rung of the water tower ladder, on all of the leaves of the tree beside us. I wanted his name on all these things and more. I was so afraid no one would know he had even existed.

'Don't look back. Go in the car and don't look back.'
'Looking back is all I've got,' he said.

'We had the party. We had our story.' He liftet his glass and walked to the garden wall for a better view of the city. 'That's it - the whole mad thing.' He looked at the miles of buildings. 'It's like an explosion of life happening and then it's gone'.

They say you know nothing at eighteen. But there are things you know at eighteen that you will never know again.

He was dulling himself. He drank like that, too: as if oblivion was a perfect place to be by yourself.

'I totally love those words,' he said, 'and I wish they were mine'.

My dad wandered off in search of himself.

Make death proud to take us.

The people I grew up with felt glamorous watching films, listening to records, or reading books written by people who unfolded their lives, who told of the time they loved and the time they died and the time they danced at EL Moroco.

He found he was a man who repented almost everything, regrets crowding in around him like moths to a light. This was actually the main difference between twenty-one and fifty-one, he decided, the sheer volume of regret.

A life, remembered, is a series of photographs and disconnected short films.

"I was in the hotel," he said finally. "I followed your footprints in the snow". There were tears on his face.
"Okay," someone said, "but why are you crying?".
"I'd thought I was the only one", he said.

Something must linger, a half-life of marriage, some sense memory of love even if obviously not the thing itself. He thought these people must mean something to one another, even if they didn't like one another anymore.

Those previous versions of herself were so distant now that remembering them was almost like remembering other people, acquaintances, young women whom she'd known a long time ago, and she felt such compassion for them.

If you are the light, if your enimies are the darkness, then there's nothing that you cannot justify.

They spend all their lives waiting for their lives to begin.