The happiness at getting what you want is not usually commensurate with the worry leading up to it.

I allowed myself to suffer how jarringly destructive the present feels and how fragile the past.

The word friends doesn't seem to stretch big enough to describe how we feel about each other. We forget where one of us starts and the other one stops.

People left a lot of things behind when they went in the water. Their clothes, their stuff, their makeup, their fixed-up hair, their voices, their hearing, their sight--at least as they normally experienced them....Some people lost their individuality in the water, but Riley always felt most herself. Water was supposed to symbolize renewal, she knew, but when Riley swam, pared down, alone, and unreachable--she felt a deeper sense of who she already was.

You don't have time, Len. That is the most bitter and the most beautiful pieve of advice I can offer. If you don't have what you want now, you don't have what you want. -pg276

She had to have faith not just in trying but in failing. Was she strong enough to fail Was she strong enough not to

Some things have to be believed to be seen. -Ralph Hodgson