“So many thingsI know about myselfI've learned from others. Without someone else to listen, to judge, to tell me what to do, and choose who I am, do I get to decide for myself?”

“Some days I sit in the rocker,the quilt about me though it's hot outside. I shun the sunlight, groan to think of the water I must fetch, the steps I'll have to take, the work that's neededjust to exist.”

“What does it matterwhen I make mistakes?They don'tmake mewhoIam.”

“Ringo: 'I do get emotional when I think back about those times. My make-up is emotional. I'm an emotional human being. I'm very sensitive and it took me till I was forty-eight to realize that was the problem!We were honest with each other and we were honest about the music. The music was positive. It was positive in love. They did write - we all wrote - about other things, but the basic Beatles message was Love.”

“Just don't eat all of it," Ram fusses. "It could be tampered with. You should show it to your dad first, he'll know--""Ram has Seahorse Syndrome," Sahara tells me wisely."What's that?" I ask."In seahorses the dad's the one who gets pregnant and has babies. We learned about it in life science class. Ram thinks he's a mother hen. So he must be a seahorse.”

“I was the new boy. It was like joining a new class at school where everybody knows everybody else but me.”

“Like so many others of my tenure and temperament—stubborn ancients, I suppose—web reporting is anathema to everything I love about newspapering: getting a tip, developing leads, fleshing-out the details, then telling the story. Now it stops with the tip. Just verify (hopefully!) and post it. I didn’t write stories anymore; I 'produced content.”