We all need mantras, I guess - stories we tell ourselves to keep us going.

Everything ends, people move on, they don't look back. It's how they should be.

We can never understand. We can only try, fumbling our way through the tunneled places, reaching for light.

You must hurt, or be hurt.

This is what amazes me: that people are new every day. That they are never the same. You must always invent them, and they must always invent themselves, too.

people themselves are full of tunnels: winding, dark spaces and caverns; impossible to know all the places inside of them. Impossible even to imagine.

The house, the pond, the tree-it was all both overwhelmingly familiar and different from what she remembered-smaller and shabbier, somehow. It was like waking up to find that your reflection in the mirror had aged overnight, or had sprouted a new mole: You were forced to admit that things changed, whether you gave them permission to or not.