“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.”

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

“The years roll on and life seems like this more and more, that choices don't really exit in the way I thought they would when I was a child and expected the regal power of adulthood to provide clarity and insight.”

“There must be many of us whose lives have been divided into a before and after, with an accident, a death, a crime, a crisis, some moment or year or relationship that came between and changed everything. I want to see how your life moved forward from that point of division.”

“In adolescence she thought it was too early to choose; now, in young adulthood, she was convinced it was too late to change.”

“Living like an empty shell is not really living, no matter how many years it may go on. The heart and flesh of an empty shell give birth to nothing more than the life of an empty shell.”