“Out of the blue, Paul reported feeling bouts of calm euphoria, a mystical sense of all's-right-with-his-life-and-the-universe, a bright future in sight. ... I knew well the state of vigorous calm he meant, a frequent visitor throughout my own life. [p. 290]”

“Our days flowed around well-charted, often traveled courses, and yet, the underlying sense of falling out of time, out of the trajectory of one's life, not by choice, but by subtraction, was frequent and disquieting. Then I grieved for him, for the lost and previous Paul. He grieved for that man too. Both our griefs were mainly private, internal, unuttered. Return was impossible, and there was only one direction open ; and so we kept our compass pointed forward. [p. 286]”

“I understood the therapists were trying to rebuild Paul's vocabulary, beginning wit the rudiments, but Paul found it taxing, boring, and disturbingly condescending. His loss of language didn't mean he was any less a grown-up with adult feelings, experiences, worries, and problems. [p. 144]”

“I don’t want to be a passenger in my own life.”

“Which is crueler, an old man's lost memories of a life lived, or a young man's lost memories of the life he meant to live?”

“What remained would gradually acquire its own shape and dimension, but many of our favorite things, my favorite ways of being a couple, had vanished and it was no use pretending, hoping, wishing that he would return to his old self, and me to mine. [p. 156]”

“I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I have just lived the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.”