“My chest bumps like a dryer with shoes in it.”

“I'd like to be the sort of person who can enjoy things at the time, instead of having to go back in my head and enjoy them.”

“JAY: No really. Be secure. Pretend I'm a sperm cell. Here. I take the string out of the... hood of my sweatshirt, affix it to my behind for a tail, like so...LENORE: What in God's name are you doing?JAY: Pretend, Lenore. Be an ovum. Be strong. Let me hypothetically batter at you. Batter batter. Surrender to the unreal of the real interior.LENORE: Are you supposed to be a sperm, wriggling your sweatshirt-string like that?JAY: I can feel the strength of your membrane, Lenore.”

“The sun is a hammer. I can feel one side of my face start to cook. The blue sky is glossy and fat with heat, a few thin cirri sheared to blown strands like hair at the rims.”

“My whole life I've been a fraud. I'm not exaggerating. Pretty much all I've ever done all the time is try to create a certain impression of me in other people. Mostly to be liked or admired. It's a little more complicated than that, maybe. But when you come right down to it it's to be liked, loved. Admired, approved of, applauded, whatever. You get the idea.”

“The night-noises of the metro night: harbor-wind skirling on angled cement, the shush and sheen of overpass traffic, TPs' laughter in interior rooms, the yowl of unresolved cat-life. Horns blatting off in the harbor. Receding sirens. Confused inland gulls' cries. Broken glass from far away. Car horns in gridlock, arguments in languages, more broken glass, running shoes, a woman's either laugh or scream from who can tell how far, coming off the grid. Dogs defending whatever dog-yards they pass by, the sounds of chains and risen hackles.”

“They said downstairs the Parnate made me black out. It did a blood pressure thing. My mother heard noises upstairs and found me she said down on my side chewing the rug in my room. My room’s shag-carpeted. She said I was on the floor flushed red and all wet like when I was a newborn; she said she thought at first she hallucinated me as a newborn again. On my side all red and wet.''A hypertensive crisis will do that. It means your blood pressure was high enough to have killed you. Sertraline in combination with an MAOI2828 will kill you, in enough quantities. And with the toxicity of that much lithium besides, I'd say you're pretty lucky to be here right now.’ 'My mother sometimes thinks she's hallucinating.’ 'Sertraline, by the way, is the Zoloft you kept instead of discarding as instructed when changing medications.’ 'She says I chewed a big hole out of the carpet. But who can say.”