“You know when you're floating on your back in the lake, the water rises and falls against your ears? So that for half a second you can hear everything around you and then for the other half a second everything's muted? It almost feels like your suspended between two worlds.”

“You know when you're sitting on a chair and you lean back so you're just on two legs and you lean too far so you almost fall over but at the last second you catch yourself? I feel like that all the time...”

“That minute, that tiny second when you hit the water flat on, you lose your breath. All the air flattens out of you - like going flat out on concrete. Then the next second you're sliding through, sliding and sinking slowly to the bottom of the pool. You touch the bottom, you bounce once there gently like an astronaut. And you feel the bottom of the pool against the soles of your feet and that's queer-but not queer, because you're the same person, aren't you? Just in another place that's all, you've still got the same body there. You look around, in that blue time, in that deep place. You look around with the same eyes, at the milky chlorine blue, and you have so much time there. Deep in the water with your same body, but everything's different, everything's better.”

“You can spend the entire second half of your life recovering from the mistakes of the first half.”

“For the first half of your life each minute feels like a year, but for the second half, each year feels like a minute.”

“I'm feeling anxious about tonight - half dread and half excitement - like when you hear thunder and know that any second you'll see lightning tearing across the sky, nipping at the clouds with its teeth.”