“I can't afford to take responsibilities for others' lives. It's all I can do to bear the weight of my own life and my own loneliness.”

“I know I can't make time slow down, can't hold our life as it is in a freeze frame or slow my children's inexorable journeys into adulthood and lives of their own. But I can celebrate those journeys by bearing witness to them, by paying attention, and, perhaps most of all, by carrying on with my own growth and becoming. Now it dawns on me that the only way I can figure out what I'm meant to be doing is to try to understand who I'm meant to be...I will not waste this life, not one hour, not one minute. I will not take for granted the blessing of our being here...I will give thanks...”

“I live my own life and nurse my own wounds. It's not the best way to live. But it's the way I am.”

“What makes loneliness an anguish is not that I have no one to share my burden, but this: I have only my own burden to bear.”

“I'm tired of being responsible for other people's misery. I can't even put up with my own.”

“This, then, is my choice:I can allow the events of my life to happen to me.Or I can take those very same actions and make them my own. I can live in my own present, risk failure, be assured of failure.”