"If you live long enough, Bill - it's a world of epilogues," Richard Abbott said. - John Irving

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.’ (David Copperfield)

“But all that night he lay awake because the phantoms of those days were not gone. Like the tiny, terrible holes in the prophylactics, the phantoms of those days were not easy to detect — and their meaning was unknown — but they were there.

I have learned that the consequences of our past actions are always interesting; I have learned to view the present with a forward-looking eye.

...the demands of writing and of real life are not always similar.