“This should be my favorite part, being held and crying with Big Bob without hope. We all work so hard all the time. This is the only place I ever really relax and give up.”

“At almost every meeting since then, Big Bob has made me cry. I never went back to the doctor. I never chewed the valerian root.This was freedom. Losing all hope was freedom. If I didn't say anything, people in a group assumed the worst. They cried harder, I cried harder. Look up into the stars and you're gone.Walking home after a support group, I felt more alive than I'd ever felt. I wasn't host to cancer or blood parasites; I was the little warm center that the life of the world crowded around.”

“I'm giving you my life to prove to myself I can, I really can love somebody. Even when I'm not getting paid, I can give love and happiness and charm. You see, I can handle the baby food and the not talking and being homeless and invisible, but I have to know that I can love somebody. Completely and totally, permanently and without hope of reward, just as an act of will, I will love somebody.”

“Hope is something really tough and tenacious you have to give up. It’s an addiction to break.”

“Help me give up my addiction to Hope.”

“The truth is that all this was just part of the suicide process. Because tanning and steroids are only a problem if you plan to live a long time.Because the only difference between a suicide and a martyrdom really is the amount of press coverage. If a tress falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, doesn’t it just lie there and rot? And if Christ had died from a barbiturate overdose, alone on the bathroom floor, would He be in Heaven This wasn’t a question of whether I was going to kill myself. This, this effort, this money and time, the writing team, the drugs, the diet, the agent, the flights of stairs going up to nowhere, all this was so I could off myself with everyone’s full attention.”

“With my eyes closed, I ask if she knows how this will all turn out."Long-term or short-term?" she asks.Both."Long-term," she says, "we're all going to die. Then our bodies will rot. No surprise there. Short-term, we're going to live happily ever after."Really?"Really," she says. "So don't sweat it.”