“Samuel McDermott or not, I was Ian McDermott, and the way I saw life was the way I'd live life.”

“I only had one life, and I'd be damned if I'd live it in a way that would make me unhappy and please somebody else. I had already lived that kind of life, too much of it already.”

“Not that I regretted having Annie; I'd never felt that way for a second. I just regretted that I'd never had a chance to live the life I'd thought I was supposed to.”

“Fiona says that I have trouble moving on. That I cling to the past...I knew that I would miss it. I'd miss the way my life used to be when I worked there. I always miss the way my life used to be, and the best way to prevent that is to not change my life very much.”

“Something changed then. I saw my life in scale: it was just my life. It was not momentous, and only now did I recognize that it had once seemed so to me; that was while my father was watching.I saw myself the way I'd seen the cleaning women in the building across the street. I was just one person in one window. Nobody was watching, except me.”

“I live my own life and nurse my own wounds. It's not the best way to live. But it's the way I am.”