“After sixty-one years together, she simply clutched my hand and exhaled.”

“She admired him; she was used to clutching her hands together in his wake and heaving audible sighs. ”

“I divide my life into two parts. Not really a Before and After, more as if they are bookends, holding together flaccid years of empty musings, years of late adolescent or the twentysomething whose coat of adulthood simply does not fit.”

“Inhale when I inhale. Exhale when I exhale. Breathe with me,for two beating hearts breathing one breath together become one.”

“One day, while at the drugstore picking up some aspirin for my Mom, dear old Mrs. Burns, our pharmacist, shoved a pack of condoms into my hand with a conspiratorial wink."They glow in the dark," she whispered.This, from a sixty-five year-old granny, I kid you not. Stuff of nightmares.”

“In the past few years, I have made a thrilling discovery ... that until one is over sixty, one can never really learn the secret of living. One can then begin to live, not simply with the intense part of oneself, but with one's entire being.”