"Life is not a series of isolated ponds and puddles; life is this river you see below, before you. It flows from the past through the present on its way to the future.

"Life is a river" she repeated. Only in the most literal sense are we born on the day we leave our mother's womb. In the larger, truer sense we are born of the past- connected to its fluidity both generationally and experientially.

" --From Wally Lamb's 'This Much I Know is True'