“Is it too late?" I asked Margot Cherry that afternoon. It's been more than thirty years and still I can remember how my voice shook. "How do we know when we've loved someone all that we can?”

“That's the way it was, always will be. nothing we can do to make it different. It's a story now, and stories have endings even when you don't know- fools like me- that you're already in the middle of one, and you're already making choices... Choices that will bring you to places you'd never thought you'd be, places in your heart you'll mourn and love the rest of your life.~Mr. Dees”

“When someone you love disappears, it's like the light goes dim, and you're in the shadows. You try to do what people tell you: put one foot in front of the other; keep looking up; give yourself over to the seconds and minutes and hours. But always there's taht glimmer of light-that way of living you once knew-sort of faded and smoky like the crescent moon on a winter's night when the air is full of ice and clouds, but still there, hanging just over your head. You think it's not far. Your think at any moment you can reach out and grab it.”

“When you're Singapore's leader and your existence depends on performance - extraordinary performance, better than your competitors - when that performance disappears because the system on which it's been based becomes eroded, then you've lost everything... I try to tell the younger generation that and they say the old man is playing the same record, we've heard it all before. I happen to know how we got here and I know how we can unscramble it." - On one freak election result ruining Singapore”

“... in a snap the world can fall down around you and leave you, for years and years, trying to get back to a place where once upon a time you were happy.”

“You can pretend that your life is going on when really, all along, you’re trapped in a moment you’ll never be able to change.”

“That dream was still in my head, that crazy dream about Katie and me on Dumbo the elephant and Mr. Dees walking in the clouds. When I opened my mouth, the dream was on my tongue, as was the feeling that I'd had ever since--the sensation that sometimes life was so wonderful it was scary, not to be trusted.”