“I took off my sweatshirt and dropped it on the grass and set off around the track. As soon as I started running, the world changed. The bodies spread out across the green of the football field were parts of a scene remembered, not one real at this moment. The secret of effort is to keep on, I told myself. Not for the world would I have stopped then, and yet nothing- not even if I had been turned handsome as a reward for finishing- could have made up for the curious pain of the effort.”

“I tried to resist the urge to reach for my camera. I tried to look, really look, as though this took an effort far greater than the movement of my eyes. You are here, I would say to myself, no part of this moment is melting into the future. You are only here and nowhere else. But I could never believe it. So I would take a photo to stop the world. So that I could keep moving”

“Nothing could be worse than the fear that one had given up too soon, and left one unexpended effort that might have saved the world.”

“even the slow, soft telepathic connection between us- the sense of connectedness that linked us even when we were in the same room- the sense that we were not two people but rather one ecstatic and indivisible whole, had vanished. i couldnt even feel his pain. but i could feel mine. i felt as if a part of myself had been cut off, as if there was within my soul a hole so gaping and empty that the whole world could pass through it and still i would not feel a thing.”

“...the love, respect, and confidence of my children was the sweetest reward I could receive for my efforts to be the woman I would have them copy.”

“A few moments later Mom opened my door and peered in at me. "Logan Hansen is here to see you."If it had been anyone else in the world, I would have told my mother to send him away. Santa Claus himself could have shown up to explain his whereabouts since my childhood, and I would have turned him out.”