“Things happen, I thought, and we respond. That's what it all comes down to. To believe anything else, as far as I could tell, was simply an illusion.”

“What I wished more than anything was that the thing hadn't happened at all, and I thought that by not mentioning it I'd be doing everyone else a favor.”

“It's overwhelming. I feel as if I am living in an illusion a dream where all things are possible. Amazing things do happen I know but always to someone else always in some far off place and time.”

“I believed we could know what was happening to us. We were not excluded from our own lives. That is not my head on someone else's body in the photograph that's introduced as evidence. I didn't believe that nations play-act on a grand scale. I lived in the real.”

“Thinking and prayer are much the same thing anyway, when you stop to think about it -- if that makes any sense. Prayer goes up and thought comes down -- or so it seems. As far as I can tell, that's the only difference.”

“But what do I have? The things I'm told and the things I tell, that's all. And as far as I know, that never yet made anyone fly.”