“This was Scott. This is Scott, always looking back to try to figure out how to go forward, where happiness and prosperity must surely await.”

“... while I bathed, while I tried but failed to sleep, I considered how I might become more like the women I respected and admired. Surrounded as I was by ambitious, accomplished women, I couldn't ignore the little voice in my head that said maybe I was supposed to shed halfway, and do something significant. Contribute something. Accomplish something. Choose. Be.”

“If only people could travel as easily as words. Wouldn't that be something? If only we could be so easily revised.”

“Life's most profound moments were, paradoxically, its most common ones: first breaths, and last.”

“If only. Were there sadder words than these?”

“Some rules are nothing but old habits that people are afraid to change.”

“Life is perphas after all simply this thing and then the next. We are all of us improvising. We find a careful balance only to discover that gravity or stasis or love or dismay or illness or some other force suddenly tows us in an unexpected direction. We wake up to find that we have changed abruptly in a way that is perculiar and inexplicable. We are constanly adjusting, making it up, feeling our way forward, figuring out how to be and where to go next. We work it out, how to be happy, but sooner or later comes a change-sometimes something small, sometimes everything at once- and we have to start over again, feeling our way back to a provisional state of contentment.”