Gail Caldwell, A Strong West Wind

"The trick is to let a time like ours shape you utterly without its becoming the apex of your life. The trick is to relinquish the drama and walk out of the fire, burnished and whole, and hold on to its legacies without looking back. Otherwise you fall prey to your own brilliant possibility; you become Updike's Rabbit Angstrom, muddling along in your melancholia, married first and always to the amber past."

Gail Caldwell, A Strong West Wind (p108)