“It's hard to imagine talking to Lucy. But I can imagine sleeping with her. I have been imagining it quite regularly. I can't stop imagining it. Maybe it's time for my first Lucy Branch, my first truly physical relationship. And why do I assume it would be a bad thing? Maybe it's better with someone different from you. I could teach her how fluorocarbons affect the ozone. She could teach me about oral sex.We would both become better people.”

“I used to wonder why Lucy liked those songs so much. You know what I mean? She sits in the dark and listens and cries. Music does that to her...I didn't understand for a long time. But I do now. The sad songs are a safe hurt. It's a diversion. It's controlled. And maybe it helps you imagine that real pain will be like that. But it's not. Lucy knows that, of course. You can't prepare for real pain. You just have to let it rip you apart.”

“I can't stop thinking about dying the way humans do it. Imagine! If at any moment, you could just stop existing. How different everything would be.." They don't stop existing Lenia said...They have souls that live forever. Even knowing that, they fight so hard to stay alive. I think it's so beautiful. Imagine: being that fragile, that permanent.”

“She told her journal about me passing by her in the parking lot, about how on that night I had touched her-literally, she felt it, reached out. What I had looked like then. How she dreamed about me. How she had fashioned the idea that a spirit could be a sort of second skin for someone, a protective layer somehow. How maybe if she was assiduous she could free us both. I would read over her shoulder as she wrote down her thoughts and wonder if anyone might believe her one day. When she was imagining me, she felt better, less alone, more connected to something out there. To someone out there. She saw the corn field in her dreams, and a new world opening, a world where maybe she could find a foothold too. “You’re a really good poet Ruth,” she imagined me saying, and her journal would release her into a daydream of being such a good poet that her words had the power to resurrect me.”

“Lucy woke out of the deepest sleep you can imagine, with the feeling that the voice she liked best in the world had been calling her name.”

“Am I crazy?" she asked. "I feel like I am sometimes." "Maybe," he said, rubbing her forehead. "But don't worry about it. You need to be a little bit crazy. Crazy is the price you pay for having an imagination. It's your superpower. Tapping into the dream. It's a good thing not a bad thing.”