“This sort of obsessing would get him nowhere. He needed to move on, to get going, to look forward.”

“Iknew that all the attributes he was teased for, at age five, were going to work in his favor by thetime he was thirty-five…but I couldn’t get him there overnight. You can’t fast-forward your child’slife, no matter how much you want to.”

“Chase every rung of possibility, and you still get absolutely nowhere.”

“But I wouldn't get him close, and I would never show him my heart.”

“I find myself staring at the goldfish. Bright as a penny, he swims in circles, happy to be going nowhere.”

“What looks like garbage from one angle might be art from another. Maybe it did take a crisis to get to know yourself; maybe you needed to get whacked hard by life before you understood what you wanted out of it.”

“...because he believed that if you wanted to get rid of a hole, you filled it. He had not realized at the time that there were all sorts of filler that took up space, but had no substance. That made you feel just as empty.”