“I am, I guess, depressed. I guess I've been depressed for about twenty-four years. I can feel a better version of me somewhere in there - hidden behind a liver or attached to a bit of spleen within my stunted, childish body - a Libby that's telling me to get up, do something, grow up, move on. But the meanness usually wins out. (2)”

“At heart, I have always been a coper, I've mostly been able to walk around with my wounds safely hidden, and I've always stored up my deep depressive episodes for the weeks off when there was time to have an abbreviated version of a complete breakdown. But in the end, I'd be able to get up and on with it, could always do what little must be done to scratch by.”

“He's stuck with me and I'm stuck with him. We're stuck. That's what growing up is all about, I guess.”

“I get up at seven yeah and I go to work at nine. I got no time for livin'. Yes I'm workin' all the time. It seems to me I could live my life a lot better than I think I am. I guess that's why they call me they call me the workin' man.”

“I am a quiet man. I tend to think things through and try not to say too much. But here I am, saying perhaps too much. But there are these feelings inside me which need badly to escape, I guess. And this makes me feel relieved because one of my big concerns these past few years is that I've been losing my ability to feel things with the same intensity- the way I felt when I was younger. It's scary- to feel your emotions floating away and just not caring. I guess what's really scary is not caring about the loss.”

“The woman who looks back at me from my bathroom mirror is sliding toward her mid-fifties. She'd better be careful- she's getting old. I myself am about thirty. I've been thirty for about twenty-three years now.”