“I felt naked beneath the wildness of her eyes. I felt alive. Unknown. And I knew then that the world contained so many things I would never understand.”

“And I never felt that good in my life. But I also felt bad because I saw her naked without her permission.”

“So many things in the world have happened before. But it's like they never did. Every new thing that happens to a person, it's a first... In that night I felt expansion, as if the world was branching out in shoots and growing faster than the eye could see. I felt smallness, how the earth divided into bits and kept dividing. I felt stars.”

“Though I knew in my mind that others had felt such loss, this loss was mine, and I felt that no one would ever understand it, and to try to explain the lonliness and pain I felt would be futile.”

“Somehow, by dealing with the dead, I had never felt so alive.”

“I didn't know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for 'em...”