“Maybe it was inertia -or worse, fear- that was keeping me in the same place.”

“Okay, I thought. Here you are. You are here. And you move forward becausethat's the way it works; that's the only place u can go. You keep goinguntil it stops hurting, or until you find new things to hurt you worse, Iguess. And that is the human condition, all of us lurching along in our own private miseries, because that's the way it is. Because, I guess, God didn't give us any choice. You grow up, I remembered Abigail telling me. You learn.”

“I decided.. that I could go on being scared forever, that I could keep walking, that I could carry my rage around, hot and heavy in my chest forever. But maybe there was another way. You have everything you need, my mother had told me. And maybe all I needed was the courage to admit that what I needed was someone to lean on.”

“This is the meanest thing anyone’s ever done to me,” I said, through my tear-clogged throat. “I want you to know that.” But even as the words were leaving my mouth, I knew it wasn’t true. In the grand, historical scheme of things, my father leaving us was doubtlessly worse. Which is one of the many things that sucked about my father?? he forever robbed me of the possibility of telling another man, This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me, and meaning it.”

“Everyone has sorrow. Everyone has obligations. Everyone keeps going. You lean on the people who love you. You do the best you can, and you keep going.”

“They wouldn’t have believed me, and if they had they would have wanted me to explain. And I had no explanation, no answers. When you’re on a battleground, you don’t have the luxury of time to dwell on the various historical factors and sociopolitical influences that caused the war. You just keep your head down and try to survive it, to shove the pages back in the book, close the covers and pretend that nothing’s broken, nothing’s wrong.”

“If there had been an exercise I'd liked, would I have gotten this big in the first place?”