“All systems have failed me. In fiveminutes I'll be fine again for a while, but right now the inside of my head feels like NiagaraFalls without the noise, just this mist and churning and no real sense of where earth ends andheaven begins.”

“With Jason I thought I'd finally played my cards right, and now I'm just one more of thosebroken, sad people out there, figuring out a year in advance where they can have Easter andChristmas dinner without feeling like a burden or duty to others, cursing the quality of modernmovies because it's so hard to fill weeknights with movies when they're all crap, and waiting, justwaiting, for those three drinks a night to turn into four - and then, well, then I'll be applying mymakeup in the morning, combing my hair, washing my clothes, but it's not really for anyone. I'malive, but so what.”

“what I remember is the silence in spite of the noise. In my head itmight just as well have been a snowy day in the country.”

“My mood has changed now. And the sun has gone behind the clouds. I'm in this mood I feel occasionally... this mood where there's a very good friend nearby who I should be phoning. If only I could reach that friend and talk, then everything would be just fine. The dilemma is, of course, I just don't know who that friend is. But in my heart I know my mood is merely me feeling disconnected from my true inner self.”

“Six silent people in a room got me to thinking about the voice we hear in our heads when we read, the universal narrator's voice you may well be hearing right now. Whose voice *is* it you're hearing? It's not your own, is it? I didn't think so. It never is. So I posed the question out loud...”"...When you read a book, whose voice is it you hear inside your head?" "It's certainly not my own", said Harj, and the others chimed in with the same claim."Then whose it?”

“I then return to my seat and something happens to me-- something inside me is exhausted and worn and stops spinning and I break down and cry.I cry because the future has once again found its sparkle and grown a million times larger. And I cry because... of how badly I behaved during my own personal Dark Ages-- back before I had a future and someone who cared for me from above. It is like today the sky opened up and only now am I allowed to enter.”

“The world was so unbearably pretty, and it continued being so all the way down the mountain to school. I felt slightly high because of the beauty, and the inside of my head tickled. I wondered if this is how artists go through life, with all of its sensations tickling their craniums like a peacock feather..”