“As with many life-altering events, an autoimmune illness is almost guaranteed to cause you to re-evaluate your priorities.”

“This book is a memoir - not of specific life events, but of the processes of dissociation, and of re-enlivening emotions that are shameful to admit or even to feel. It is an account of the altered states that trauma induces, which make it possible to survive a life-threatening event but impair the capacity to feel fear, and worse still, impair the ability to love.”

“But you only get so many do-overs in this life, so many chances to, if not change your past, alter your future.”

“Sure. But if the book sucks, we’re re-evaluating the friendship.”

“If you look at your life as a chain of events, each responsible for the next and caused by the last, where does any story begin?”

“The strength of a love is always misjudged if we evaluate it by its immediate cause and not the stress that went before it, the dark and hollow space full of disappointment and loneliness that precedes all the great events in the heart's history.”