"Thinking about my parents had depressed me. 'I like to think people like us won't make the same bad choices our parents made,' I said.
'And I like to think there aren't any people like us,' Claire replied. 'I guess for my sanity I need to think it. That we're basically blank slates. That the choices we've already made and will end up making--what we do with our lives, what I'm saying to your right this second--that all of it's the story, our original message to ourselves and the world, getting written all the time, again and again, till one day it just covers us like an epitaph...'
She leaned over and kissed me, briefly but fleetingly, on the mouth.
'And then I guess we'll know. Or someone will, Julian, if you and I aren't around anymore. Someone will, if not us. How it all turned out, I mean. What the odds were. How we did.'"
— John Burnham Schwartz (Claire Marvel: A Novel)