“I pull my mostly dry shawl tighter around my shoulders and dip my head so that I don’t have to look into their eyes and see the thoughts there. Lammer-whore. I am not this thing. I raise my head sharply, and with my chin jutted out I walk alongside Jannik, willing these Gris-damned bats to say something, anything. The anger waits inside me, cold and ready. Even I know it’s just a façade. I’m so scared now that I have nowhere left to go. My armor is frost thin and just as useful.”

“Anyhow, I took every stitch of clothing off and got out of bed. And I got down on my knees on the floor in the white moonlight. The heat was off and the room must have been cold, but I didn’t feel cold. There was some kind of special something in the moonlight and it was wrapping my body in a thin, skintight film. At least that’s how I felt. I just stayed there naked for a while, spacing out, but then I took turns holding different parts of my body out to be bathed in the moonlight. I don’t know, it just seemed like the most natural thing to do. The moonlight was so absolutely, incredibly beautiful that I couldn’t not do it. My head and shoulders and arms and breasts and tummy and bottom and, you know, around there: one after another, I dipped them in the moonlight, like taking a bath.”

“I don’t even close my eyes. Out there or inside my head, it’s an equal darkness. Or light.”

“I’m over here in my unit, isolated and alone, eating my terrible tasting food, and I have to look over at that. That looks like the most fun I’ve ever seen in my entire life, and it’s B.S. - excuse my language. I’m just saying that I wash and dry; I’m like a single mother. Look, we all know home-ec is a joke—no offense—it’s just that everyone takes this class to get an A, and it’s bullshit—and I’m sorry. I’m not putting down your profession, but it’s just the way I feel. I don’t want to sit here, all by myself, cooking this shitty food—no offense—and I just think that I don’t need to cook tiramisu. When am I gonna need to cook tiramisu? Am I going to be a chef? No. There’s three weeks left of school, give me a fuckin’ break! I’m sorry for cursing.”

“I don’t struggle because I was always the stupidest kid in the class and the idea that I would ever be brilliant was knocked out of me in the third grade. So I’m not sitting around trying to be brilliant, or Shakespeare. I’m just trying to get the work I have in my head down on the page in the best way I possibly know how without putting that horrible pressure on myself of saying I’m going to write it today and in 200 years at Princeton they will be studying these words.” Yeah, I want my stuff to be as good as I can conceivably make it, but I am not going to put that on my head”

“There aren’t any cobwebs on my dick. Besides, just because I don’t stick it in every woman who walks by, doesn’t mean I don’t use it. I’m selective, where as you…you’re just a man whore.“I am not a whore! Just because I happen to love women, and they love me back – doesn’t make me a whore.” “Maybe it’s your dusty penis that scares women away.”