“When we realize, really get to know what stinkers we are, it takes only a little depression to tip the scales in favor of suicide. - Dr. Walter Freeman (62)”

“This should tell you everything you need to know about guys. They only go after what they know they can get. We girls, on the other hand, aim really high. We take a leap...”

“It wasn't getting easier because it isn't supposed to get easier. Midlife was a bitch, and my educated guess was that the climb only got steeper from here. Carl Jung put it perfectly: "Thoroughly unprepared we take the step into the afternoon of life," he wrote. "Worse still, we take this step with the false assumption that our truths and ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life's morning; for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will by evening have become a lie."... I was writing a new program for the afternoon of life. The scales tipped away from suffering and toward openheartedness and love. [p. 182]”

“Sometimes we don't even realize what we really care about, because we get so distracted by the symbols.”

“It doesn't take a whole long life to realize that what we deserve to have, we rarely get.”

“When we're in the story, when we're part of it, we can't know the outcome. It's only later that we think we can see what the story was. But do we ever really know? And does anybody else, perhaps, coming along a little later, does anybody else really care? ... History is written by the survivors, but what is that history? That's the point I was trying to make just now. We don't know what the story is when we're in it, and even after we tell it we're not sure. Because the story doesn't end.”