“It doesnt upset me to think about dying. What upsets me is the idea of John being alone after his spell passes. The idea of one of us without the other. (p.127)”

“I am constantly mystified by what John ends up remembering I just dont understand why hes able to hang on to information like that, while so many other more important memories evaporate. Then again...”

“The sad truth is, John and I and the kids only took Route 66 once on our trips to Disneyland. Our family, like the rest of America, succumbed to the lure of faster highways, more direct routes, hig...”

“this is the problem with photographs. After a while, you cant remember if youre recalling the actual memory or the memory of the photograph. Or perhaps the photograph is the only reason you remembe...”

“The last slide is Main Street at night, with the castle lit silver blue in the background. In the sky, fireworks are going off, cresting, cracking open the darkness, shooting long tendrils of color...”

“I think about what the man at the Coney joint said. He was right. We are the people who stay. We stay in our homes and pay them off. We stay at our jobs. We do our thirty and come home to stay even...”

“I finally know the difference between pleasing and loving, obeying and respecting. It has taken me so many years to be okay with being different, and with being this alive, this intense. (xxvi)”

“Spring passes and one remembers one's innocence.Summer passes and one remembers one's exuberance.Autumn passes and one remembers one's reverence.Winter passes and one remembers one's perseverance.”

“Birthdays could be such a bummer when you were older than the country you lived in.”

“Dementia was like a truth serum.”

“When a fine old carpet is eaten by mice, the colors and patterns of what's left behind do not change,' wrote my neighbor and friend, the poet Jane Hirschfield, after she visited an old friend suffe...”

“Psychologist: "This, ah, is a new sort of, ah, psychopathology that we're only now beginning to, ah, understand. These, ah, super-serial killers have no, ah, 'type' but, ah, rather consider everyon...”

“Life is but a breath.The end of life is the last breath of a man.”