“They weren't coming back and I could never re-create what we had, but I could move forward.”

“If I could have wished what I thought was my perfect mate on the wind and had her come back to me in a storm, I could never have come up with anything as exquisite as you.”

“She could never go back and make some of the details pretty. All she could do was move forward and make the whole beautiful.”

“But secretly I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revalation that human beings create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not.”

“I felt myself trapped in line for a ride I was not nearly ready for, looking back but moving forward in the only direction I could go.”

“Instead, what I was beginning to understand was that however things unfolded from here on, whatever the next chapter was, my life could never be the sum of one circumstance. It would be determined, as it had always been, by my willingness to put one foot in front of the other, moving forward, come what may.”