“Can't see nothin' in front of me;
Can't see nothin' coming up behind.
I make my way through this darkness;
I can't feel nothing but this chain that binds me.
Lost track of how far I've gone,
How far I've gone, how high I've climbed.
On my back's a sixty pound stone,
On my shoulder a half mile line.”

“Oh, yesterdays are over my shoulder,
So I can't look back for too long.
There's just too much to see waiting in front of me,
and I know that I just can't go wrong.”

“One more night, God I've had to fight
To keep my line of sight on what's real
One more day I fear I've lost my way
I don't know how to say what I feel.”

“I've come too far, and I don't know how to get back.”

“While I'm writing, I'm far away;
and when I come back, I've gone.”

“I've waited for a thousand years / For you to come and blow me out my mind
The world around us makes me feel so small
If you can't hear me call / Then I can't say, Lyla / Heaven help you catch me if I fall”

“My dear young cousin, if there's one thing I've learned over the eons, it's that you can't give up on your family, no matter how tempting they make it.”

“I'll be eighty this month. Age, if nothing else, entitles me to set the record straight before I dissolve. I've given my memoirs far more thought than any of my marriages. You can't divorce a book.”

“The truth is that I wasn't there with her when she needed me. Now she see's how I love Nanhoï and she believes that I can't love her as much as I love my son. That I've never loved her like this. I try to tell her that she's distorting everything in her pain and not seeing the truth. That I've painfully missed her since our separation and that I've never stopped loving her. But even though she gradually calms down, I have a feeling she doesn't believe me.”

“It's tough when you started out as young as I did to look back and see how far I've come. I try to be easy on myself and go 'Look man, you were younger, you were learning; you learn, you grow.' But I'm not my best judge. I always feel like my best work is still ahead of me.”