“The past is a very determined ghost, haunting every chance it gets.”

“Dreams would always end with you, and then mornings would steal you away with a cruelty that haunted my days.”

“The past will find a way to squeeze into the present–if you let it.”

“The levee had always been my beach, the world beyond it, my ocean. That’s as close as it got here, anyway. No waves, no dolphins, no white sand, no sea gulls. If you were lucky enough, though, every once in a while you did get to see a crane, or a beaver.”

“Big events, small, mundane moments of the day–it doesn’t matter; the past will find a way to squeeze into the present–if you let it.”

“Every small town that I had ever been to had had a caboose.”

“She always used to say that the past is a relentless parasite in its quest, feeding off of the senses, looking for anything that will trigger a memory–forever there to complicate the present, forever there to remind us that it will always be a piece of us. I never had a clue as to what she meant, until now.”