“We thought we had such problems. How were we to know we were happy?”

“Possible, impossible. What could be done? We thought we had such problems. How were we to know we were happy?”

“How were we to know we were happy?”

“We thought we were running away from the grownups, and now we are the grownups.”

“If we were all on trial for our thoughts, we would all be hanged.”

“The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. How awful, we would say, and they were, but they were awful without being believable. They were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives. We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.”

“We shouldn't have been so scornful; we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young.”