“To touch a person...to sleep with a person...is to become a pioneer," she whispered then, "a frontiersman at the edge of their private world, the strange, incomprehensible world of their interior, filled with customs you could never imitate, a language which sounds like your own but is really totally foreign, knowable only to them.”

“The private experience that you perceive forms your world, period. But which world do you inhabit? For if you altered your private sensations of reality, then that world, seemingly the only one, would also change. You do go through transformations of beliefs all the time, and your perception of the world is different. You seem to be, no longer, the person you that you were. You are quite correct — you are not the person that you were, and your world has changed, and not just symbolically.”

“Sometimes, Blister was thinking, the only person in the world she could really count on was herself, and that was not enough.”

“Sometimes, when a person is truly lost in this world, suffocating inside her private bubble where all she can hear is her own droning heartbeat, a touch can be enough.”

“He was the only person in the world she was tongue-tied around, and yet the only person she really wanted to talk to.”

“One never forgets, of course not. The events of a person's life become a part of who they are. It would be like forgetting the sound of your own beating heart.”