“I want to tell this right. I was thirty-eight years old. I had spent my entire adult life reading meanings into other people's stories, finding the figure in the carpet, the order in things. God in the details and no place else.”

“I sat taller, to suppress my impatience. It was infuriating, this waiting. I was thirty-seven years old. And like a child, an infant, really, I was at the mercy of others. Hour after hour of my life was spent waiting.”

“I spent most of my teen years trying to figure out the rules of life, theories for why things happened, why people behaved as they did, and mostly I came to the conclusion that either there were no rules, or the rules sucked. Reading science fiction wasn't about imagining myself into some more exciting life filled with adventure, it was about finding a world where things worked the way I wanted them to.”

“As a child I had wanted to become an automobile, but then I grew up to be thirty years old.”

“I used to spend so much time reacting and responding to everyone else that my life had no direction. Other people's lives, problems, and wants set the course for my life. Once I realized it was okay for me to think about and identify what I wanted, remarkable things began to take place in my life.”

“All my life I had wanted to travel but what I discovered that year was that the things that you find out become the places that you go and sometimes you find them out by being jettisoned off alone and other times it is the people who choose to stand by your side who give you the clues. But the important things that happen to you will happen to you even in the smallest places...”