“Under your shelter all things come and go.Children are violent and valiant, they run and they shout like the winners of impossible victories, but before long now, even like me, they will be brought into their sleep.Those who are grown great talk with confidence and are at all times skillful to serve and to protect, but before long now they too, before long, even like me, will be taken in and put to bed.Soon come those hours when no one wakes. Even the locusts, even the crickets, silent shall be, as frozen brooksIn your break sheltering. [sic]”

“Before forty, you think that exhaustion is something like a long-lasting hangover. But at forty you learn all about it. Even your passions exhaust you.”

“Now that I’ve come to terms with the fact that the bastard is going to affect me whether I like it or not, he’s even hotter than before.”

“And even now, even after all I put him through, he's saving me. I've been trying to find my way into the light for so long, and he just comes along and takes me there.”

“For I knew already that something had taken me from me, and had replaced it with a desperate longing for a time before; a time before fear; a time before shame. And now that knowledge had a voice that rose from the depths of my years and howled into the night sky like a wounded animal longing for home.”

“When you start thinking about what your life was like 10 years ago--and not in general terms, but in highly specific detail--it's disturbing to realize how certain elements of your being are completely dead. They die long before you do. It's astonishing to consider all the things from your past that used to happen all the time but (a) never happen anymore, and (b) never even cross your mind. It's almost like those things didn't happen. Or maybe it seems like they just happened to someone else. To someone you don't really know. To someone you just hung out with for one night, and now you can't even remember her name.”