“Things happen when people are not where they belong, and the world moves forward and back by that principle.”

“Humans generally get out the gist of what they need to say right at the beginning, then spend forever qualifying, contradicting, burnishing or taking important things back. Yor rareley miss anything by cutting most people off after two sentences.”

“The most important things of your life can change so suddenly, so unrecoverably, that you can forget even the most important of them and their connections, you are so taken up by the chanciness of all's that happened and by all that could and will happen next.”

“And what there is to learn from almost any human experience is that your own interests usually do not come first where other people are concerned--even the people who love you--and that is all right. It can be lived with.”

“I had more positive views. Which made me feel that although I hadn't been taught to assimilate, a person perhaps assimilated without knowing it. I was doing it now. You did it alone, and not with other or for them. And assimilating possibly wasn't so hard and risky and didn't need to be permanent. This state of mind conferred another freedom on me and was like starting life over, or as I've already said, becoming someone else -- but someone who was not stalled but moving, which was the nature of things in the world. I could like it or hate it, but the world would change around me no matter how I felt.”

“...good counsel: generosity, longevity, acceptance, relinquishment, letting the world come to me -- and, with these things to make a life.”

“My parents...were people running from the past, who didn't look back at much if they could help it, and whose whole life always lay somewhere in the offing.”