“When we think we can do it all ourselves--fix, save, buy, or date a nice solution--it's hopeless. We're going to screw things up. We're going to get our tentacles wrapped around things and squirt our squiddy ink all over, so that there is even less visibility, and then we're going to squeeze the very life out of everything.”

“We all go through life as puzzled monkeys. The minute we think we're any more than that, we've made a grave mistake. We're just trying to gain some meaning of it all, some understanding. The only thing we can do is buy the ticket, take the ride. And offer our barbaric yawps to the world...”

“The culture doesn't encourage you to think about such things until you're about to die. We're so wrapped up with egostical things, career, family, having enough money, meeting the mortgage, getting a new car, fixing the radiator when it breaks. We're involved in trillions of little acts just to keep going . So we don't get into the habit of standing back and looking at our lives and saying, Is this all? Is this all I want? Is something missing?”

“It's that undefined something we're really afraid of-the flicker of movement we don't quite catch out of the corner of our eye, the bad dream we can't quite remember when we wake up, the sound of a door opening downstairs we thought we heard. And worst of all, the things we're not sure even happened, the things that we might just have imagined, that might mean we're going mad, all those nameless, nebulous things we can't quite put our finger on and can only guess at.”

“Sometimes when we forget to do things for others, it's because we're too wrapped up in our own problems.”

“We're all selfish. It's an age thing. We go spotty, disobedient and daft. But most of all, we go selfish”