“I called Mom from the hotel during the period of peace, I'd turned out all of the lights and closed the curtains in pursuit of sensory deprivation. It was Black and sensationless. All There was in the room was my voice and mom's voice trickling out of the phone's earpiece, and this feeling passed through me-this feeling of what a gift it is that people are able to speak to each other while they're alive. These casual conversations, this familiar voice heard through a Las Vegas hotel room telephone. It was strange to realize that, in one since, all we are is our voice.”

“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?”

“My mind then wandered. I thought of this: I thought of how every day each of us experiences a few little moments that have just a bit more resonance than other moments—we hear a word that sticks in our mind—or maybe we have a small experience that pulls us out of ourselves, if only briefly—we share a hotel elevator with a bride in her veils, say, or a stranger gives us a piece of bread to feed to the mallard ducks in the lagoon; a small child starts a conversation with us in a Dairy Queen—or we have an episode like the one I had with the M&M cars back at the Husky station. And if we were to collect these small moments in a notebook and save them over a period of months we would see certain trends emerge from our collection—certain voices would emerge that have been trying to speak through us. We would realize that we have been having another life altogether; one we didn’t even know was going on inside us. And maybe this other life is more important than the one we think of as being real—this clunky day-to-day world of furniture and noise and metal. So just maybe it is these small silent moments which are the true story-making events of our lives.”

“And then suddenly I realized that I was feeling- well, that I was actually feeling. My old personality was, after months of pills and pleasant nothingness, returning. Just the littlest bit- for I had only stopped taking my little yellow pills the day before- but my essence was already asserting itself, however weakly at this point. I felt a lump in my throat, and I spent the rest of the day walking around this strange and beautiful city, remembering myself, what it used to feel like to be me, before I switched myself off, before I stopped listening to my inner voices.”

“In periods of rapid personal change, we pass through life as though we are spellcast. We speak in sentences that end before finishing. We sleep heavily because we need to ask so many questions as we dream alone. We bump into others and feel bashful at recognizing souls so similar to ourselves.”

“Our conversations are never easy, but as I-we-get older, we are finding that our conversations must bespoken. A need burns inside us to share with others what we are feeling Beyond a certain age, sincerity ceases to feel pornographic. It is as though the coolness that marked out youth is itself a type of retrovirus that can only leave you feeling empty. Full of holes.”

“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.”