“Did people ever stop changing? They surprised you with fresh pain. Sometimes they surprised you with happiness, but the pain was the sharper surprise. There was no way to protect yourself from it. People could always change and always hurt you. Of course it went in the other direction too, you could hurt them when you didn't intend it and that too was out of your control.”

“She thought of how much people changed you. It was the opposite of what you always heard, that no one could change a person. It wasn't true. It was only through other people that one ever did change.”

“Where were you all this time? she said. Where have you been?I guess far away.Yes you were. Too far away.They sat in silence.You know you frightened me a little, she said. At the beginning. No.You did.He smiled at that.You looked as if you didnt anyone, she said.But this are the ones who need the most, he said. Don't you know that?I do know, she said. Too late.”

“...it occurred to her how some people continued through no design of one's own to be in one's life while others might initially enter in a sort of blaze and seem to change everything but then might not stay around.”

“Unless you were high up in a building or happened to glimpse it at the end of one of the big avenues going east-west, all you knew of the sunset was a darkening in the air. No wonder people in New York were so unbalanced. They were totally untouched by the rhythms of nature. You were only aware of nature when something extreme happened, like a snowstorm or heatwave.”

“Hope is a terrible thing, she said. Is it? Yes, it keep you living in another place, a place which doesn't exist. For some people it's better than where they are. For many it's a relief. From life, she said. A relief from life? Is that living? Some people don't have a choice. No and that's awful for them. Hope is better than misery, he said. Or despair. Hope belongs in the same box as despair. Hope is not so bad, he said. At least despair has truth to it. ”

“I walk to think and not to think. When walking I remember things that are important to me.I walk to forget. I have yet to set out on a walk in low spirits and return feeling worse than I did when I left the door. A change occurs between the fate and the porch, walking lifts the weight off the heart. Or as the writer Jim Harrison says, "When you're out of sorts, walk a hundred miles.”