“I am not who I was,' he whispered, gripping the edges of the column, 'but I know who I am.'...'And I won't give up.”

“Every day I like what and who I am less and less,” he whispered more quietly than before,“because I know you wish for a different life. And I cannot give it to you.”

“He never gives up on who I am or who I could be. He doesn't run away when things get complicated.”

“I've lived too long with pain. I won't know who I am without it.”

“Who am I helping, what am I breaking, what am I giving, what am I taking?”

“Shut up!" I say, holding my hands to my ears. "Shut up!"But the stupid gummy won't shut up; he's trying to tell me something important even though I'm covering my ears and I don't want to hear it and I don't want to think about who I am or what's wrong with me or why I'm out here at the edge of the Urb, at the edge of the known world, listening to some old mope who's so crazy, he think about the future when everyone knows that the future doesn't exist.”