“Anger, hate, blind temper, that crazy switch to destroy, all of it purified into discipline and control, the best side of boxing, Billy says.”

“I try to remember everything, every thing, but sometimes I forget something. I don’t even know what it is sometimes, but I know it’s not coming to me, something about him isn’t coming to me and when that happens, when a piece is missing, it makes me crazy. I don’t know what to do with that.”

“Like the line of love, I thought. Once crossed you can't go back. Like the line between past and future. Or maybe really the line between past and now. The now my father spoke of. When I raced ... I would cross the line and there was no more thinking about what was going to be because it was. It happened that fast.”

“Let's take a walk. You can show me some of your memories and I'll show you some of mine.”

“Anger, hate, blind temper, that crazy switch to destroy, all of it purified into discipline and control, the best side of boxing, Billy says.”

“He wanted to break me, the me I'd made, the me I'd needed to make, my need, mine, my whole life since I could remember. I didn't want to hear him that night. When I was ready to change I'd change. When life opens up before you, when you don't really know death ... it's easy to promise yourself change. Keeping the lines hard, the parts of me separate, was what I knew, how I lived.”

“My father nodded. His nod was for me. Different. But not different at all. My father understood. Maybe he had known. Maybe he hadn't. It didn't matter anymore. He understood. I knew he understood, just from his nod, just from his eyes on mine, making his eyes kind for me, and the wave of pain went away for a moment.”

“And I'd noticed her eyes, the lightest blue, and alive, moving here and there and then staring straight on. And now there's darkness under her eyes like she hasn't slept well for too many days, almost like someone punched her just hard enough to leave a little black, a quarter-moon smudge under each eye.”

“Her grief has not so much changed her as stripped her down, stripped her body and her face.”

“We play phone tag, back and forth, the kind of tag where it's clear we're avoiding each other, where no one wants to be touched, tagged, you're it”

“She can look at you and make you feel like you’re the only one in the world. Even if it’s not true, she can make you feel that way. And with her child, it would be true. She would look at her child for as long as her child needed.”