In life, every ending is just the start of another story.

To own a certain book - and to choose it without help - is to define yourself.

Because love is the meeting point of truth and magic. Truth, as in photography; magic, as in ballooning.

(on grief) And you do come out of it, that’s true. After a year, after five. But you don’t come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life.

Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn't all it's cracked up to be.

I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory.

This was long before the term 'single-parent family' came into use; back then it was a 'broken home'.