“Still, looking through the old volumes was soothing, because thinking of the past made the present seem a little less real.”

“... some people - think only the present is real. The past and the future don't even exist. ... And some people say that the future and the present are made up of a lot of different worlds. Each world comes out of a different set of circumstances that might have happened in the past.”

“The present doesn’t change the past. Is the fact that the past happened enough to make the present good? Is the past real? Was it real anymore?”

“The danger would be going back, or staying still. The only way out was through. The past was ruins, but the present was still in play.”

“[Women's magazines]ignore older women or pretend that they don’t exist; magazines try to avoid photographs of older women, and when they feature celebrities who are over sixty, ‘retouching artists’ conspire to ‘help’ beautiful women look more beautiful, ie less than their age...By now readers have no idea what a real woman’s 60 year old face looks like in print because it’s made to look 45. Worse, 60 year old readers look in the mirror and think they are too old, because they’re comparing themselves to some retouched face smiling back at them from a magazine.”

“Reading always calmed me down: filling my head with other - made up - people's problems and conflicts made my own seem less terrible, less real.”