“Now when I was fifteen, oh I knew it was overThe road to enchantment was not mine to takeCause lower calf, upper arm should be half what they areI was breaking the laws that the signmakers made.And all I could eat was the poisonous appleAnd that's not a story I was meant to surviveI was all out of choices, but the woman of voicesShe turned round the corner with music around her,She gave me the language that keeps me alive”

“Once she'd loved my filet mignon, my carnivore inklings,but now she was a vegan princess, living off of beans. She'd given up the cheese and bacon, sworn off BurgerKing, and when Iwouldn't do the same she gave me back my ring. I stood there by the romaine lettuce,feeling my heartpine.Wishing that this meatless beauty still would be all mine. She turned aroundto go to checkout,fifteen items or less. And I knew this was the last go-round, so this is what I said. ..."Don't you ever give me no rotten tomato, 'cause all I ever wanted was your sweetpotato.”

“When I find a magazine and I lean back to start reading it, I can see the woman watching me out of the corner of her eye. She moves closer to the child and she puts her arm around him and she leans over and kisses his forehead. I know why she does it and I don't blame her and as I open my magazine my heart breaks and I hope that the little boy doesn't grow up to be anything like me.”

“She was fifteen years old, going on thirty-five, Doc, and she told me she was eighteen, she was very willing, I practically had to take to sewing my pants shut. Between you and me, uh, she might have been fifteen, but when you get that little red beaver right up there in front of you, I don't think it's crazy at all and I don't think you do either. No man alive could resist that, and that's why I got into jail to begin with. And now they're telling me I'm crazy over here because I don't sit there like a goddamn vegetable. Don't make a bit of sense to me. If that's what being crazy is, then I'm senseless, out of it, gone-down-the-road, wacko. But no more, no less, that's it.”

“Okay,' he said. He took a breath. 'What would you do, if you could do anything?'I took a step toward him, closing the space between us. 'This,' I said. And then I kissed him.Kissed him. There, in the middle of the street, as the world went on around us. Behind me, I knew Jason was still waiting for an explanation, my sister was still lecturing, and that angel still had her eyes skyward, waiting to fly. As for me, I was just trying to get it right, whatever that meant. But now I finally felt I was on my way. Everyone had a forever, but given a choice, this would be mine. The one that began in this moment, with Wes, in a kiss that took my breath away, then gave it back- leaving me astounded, amazed, and most of all, alive.”

“When I was fifteen, I felt it coming; now I was sixteen, and it hit. My feet had imperceptibly been set on a new path...there wasn't a whole lot I could do about it, or about anything. I was going to hell on a handcart, that was all, and I knew it and everyone around me knew it, and there it was.”