The Cider House Rules

by John Irving

Was that what love was, and how it came to you—leaving you no options for its use?

I have stood aside to see the phantoms of those days go by me. They are gone, and I resume the journey of my story.

What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us are wrapped up in parentheses.

‘Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show,’ ”