“We carry on. We have ourselves and we carry on- in spite of our losses and mistakes and women, I think, have more than most. We are good secret-keepers. We can tie weights to out guilt and passions, and hatred and deceitfulness, and let them sink down, so that you'd never know they existed at all. But we know. I can count all mine.”

“Each one of us continues to carry the heart of each self we've ever been, at every stage along the way, and a chaos of everything good and rotten. And we have to carry this weight all alone, through each day that we live. We try to be as nice as we can to the people we love, but we alone support the weight of ourselves.”

“We have a weight to carryand a distance we must go.We have a weight to carry,a destination we can't know.We have a weight to carryand can put it down nowhere.We are the weight we carryfrom there to here to there.”

“We all have our crosses to bear. We carry them heavily, out of love for our brothers in arms. But sometimes you have to let go of the idea that anyone down here is in control.”

“I know we're not saints or virgins or lunatics; we know all the lust and lavatory jokes, and most of the dirty people; we can catch buses and count our change and cross the roads and talk real sentences. But our innocence goes awfully deep, and our discreditable secret is that we don't know anything at all, and our horrid inner secret is that we don't care that we don't.”

“I know that sometimes the things we carry become too much for us. We are burned down, but somehow we have to pick ourselves up and keep going”