He gently touched his mother's cheek, felt her sorrow slip over his fingertips.

something is always falling apart in me.

But you could only remake your own future, not anyone else's, and for some people that just wasn't good enough.

a public persona that might be different from what we truly feel inside... everyone wonders if they are good enough, smart enough, pretty enough, no matter how old they are. It is an archetypical moral dilemma - Do you act like yourself and risk becoming an outcast?

people think they know what they're getting, and they're always wrong.

Each memory is like a paper flower stowed up a magician's sleeve: invisible one moment and then so substantial and florid the next I cannot imagine how it stayed hidden all this time. And like those paper flowers, once they've been let loose in the world, the memories are impossible to tuck away again.

Time is an optical illusion- never quite as soild or strong as we think it is