“It seemed incredible that it could be the same road, the same asphalt, that they had traveled so many times together. You thought that you were the permanent part of your own experience, the net that held it all together—until you discovered that there were many selves, dissolving into one another so quickly over time that the buildings and the trees and even the pavement turned out to have more substance than you did.”

“... you sometimes had to force people to say things they would rather not articulate, just so they could hear their own words. It was interesting the way people could know things and not know them at the same time. Denial, he said, was like a thick stone wall.”

“He didn't understand how sadness came so easily to people. For him it was like a pile of rocks that had to be moved one at a time. Just thinking about it made him tired.”

“We are all on the same road, some ahead of us and some behind. We do not always recognize ourselves as being among those who are struggling farther back, and misunderstand, scorn, and even persecute the ones who move ahead of us. History is littered with such as these: eccentrics, geniuses, idealists among those most noticeable. These change the world by force, though the change most often does not take place during their own time, they are so far ahead of it and therefore so rarely understood.”

“You’ve got to be careful sometimes, it’s as if I’m hanging on all the time – just clinging on telling meself – life’s all right – it’s a great experience living – look at all the different people yer meeting – you really are living and then I think, Poor Cow, who are you taking on? Let’s face it, it’s just escaping from one misery to another. Who really enjoys life? Kids when you get down to it – kids are the only ones who really get a kick out of being alive...”

“How many more times would I have embraced him that night, how many more times would I have kissed him, if I had known the name of that stranger lover who was already in Montreal, who had already bought his stadium ticket from a scalper for the 5,000 tomorrow. That implacable lover who was going to turn Billy's eyes away from me forever.”

“He cannot freshly harm me here, and for that I am grateful, but the harm he previously inflicted reverberates and grows. There is nothing to heal it but time. Even here, there is no other cure for heartbreak. I wish that death were a magical cure for all that ailed my spirit in life; it is one more thing I expected and found false. I arrive with the same baggage I carried with me in life. There is nowhere to lay it down here either, no more than a woman with child can lay aside her babe before its birth, for it is within me. I am as I was, just not encumbered with flesh.”