“Each one of us continues to carry the heart of each self we've ever been, at every stage along the way, and a chaos of everything good and rotten. And we have to carry this weight all alone, through each day that we live. We try to be as nice as we can to the people we love, but we alone support the weight of ourselves.”

“Life is a performance, I thought. Perthaps the word "illusion" would have meant more or less the same thing, but to me "performance" seemed closed to the truth. Standing there in the midst of the crowd that evening, I felt this realization swirl dizzily through my body in a dazzling splendor of light, if only for an instant. Each one of us continues to carry the heart of each self we've ever been, at every stage along the way, and a chaos of everything good and rotten. And we have to carry this weight all alone, through each day that we live. We try to be as nice as we can to the people we love, but we alone support the weight of ourselves.”

“We probably have a greater love for those we support than for those who support us. Our vanity carries more weight than our self-interest.”

“The longer we live, the more weight we carry in our hearts.”

“We have a weight to carryand a distance we must go.We have a weight to carry,a destination we can't know.We have a weight to carryand can put it down nowhere.We are the weight we carryfrom there to here to there.”

“We need each other. All of us. We cannot be alone.”