“No one wants to admit we're addicted to music. That's just not possible. No one's addicted to music and television and radio. We just need more of it, more channels, a larger screen, more volume. We can't bear to be without it, but no, nobody's addicted. We could turn it off anytime we wanted. I fit a window frame into a brick wall. With a little brush, the size for fingernail polish, I glue it. The window is the size of a fingernail. The glue smells like hair spray. The smell tastes like oranges and gasoline.”

“We wanted more. We knocked the butt ends of our forks against the table, tapped our spoons against our empty bowls; we were hungry. We wanted more volume, more riots. We turned up the knob on the TV until our ears ached with the shouts of angry men. We wanted more music on the radio; we wanted beats; we wanted rock. We wanted muscles on our skinny arms. We had bird bones, hollow and light, and we wanted more density, more weight. We were six snatching hands, six stomping feet; we were brothers, boys, three little kings locked in a feud for more.”

“I got addicted. News, particularly daily news, is more addictive than crack cocaine, more addictive than heroin, more addictive than cigarettes. ”

“I was starting to understand that the more you talked about something the less it hurt, each telling deflating it a little bit more. That was why we had to say it out loud at the beginning of every meeting: My name is Delia and I'm an addict. It was so we could stop flinching and just live with it. (72)”

“. We have this attitude that people become drug addicts against their will. That they couldn’t possibly want this kind of life. But maybe that’s not true. Maybe they don’t want to live like other people — it just wouldn’t suit them.”

“I'm a reading addict. I can't live without it, like someone who is addicted to drugs.”