“I've learned that if I stay busy, especially by helping others, I don't think about my pain. In an odd way, my pain is its own therapy. I intend to go on until I can't go anymore. ”

“I didn't have a catharsis for my childhood pain, most of us don't, and until I learned how to forgive those people and let it go, I was unhappy.”

“I am an emotional plagiarist, stealing other people's pain, subsuming it into my own until I can't remember whose it is any more.”

“It's my side. I have found the pain. It is in my side, and I isolate it and define it, and arrange the other pains around it. I tell myself that pain is information, that I am learning to map the spaces of my own body. Then my body's feelings cascade toward my side, and pain pours over its outlines and erases them. ("Marriage")”

“Helping people who are going through what I've been through makes me feel like [my pain] wasn't in vain. It gives the pain I went through a sense of purpose.”

“Lately I've become so damned distracted that I can't make a decision about anything. I can't think clearly. I've got knots in my stomach, and constant pains in my chest, and whenever I see you talking to any man, or smiling at anyone, I go insane with jealousy. I can't live this way. I—" He broke off and stared at her incredulously. "Damn it, Evie, what is there for you to smile about?""Nothing," she said, hastily tucking the sudden smile back into the corners of her mouth. "It's just… it sounds as if you're trying to say that you love me.”