“I'd sooner have died than admit that the most valuable thing I owned was a fairly extensive collection of German industrial music dance mix EP records stored for even further embarrassment under a box of crumbling Christmas tree ornaments in a Portland, Oregon basement. So I told him I owned nothing of any value.”

“Truth be told, John said, the one thing in this world I want more than anything else is a great big crowbar, to jimmy myself open and take whatever creature that's sitting inside and shake it clean like a rug and then rinse it in a cold, clear lake like up in Oregon, and then I want to put it under the sun to let it heal and dry and grow and sit and come to consciousness again with a clear and quiet mind.”

“I used to care about how other people thought I led my life. But lately I've realized that most people are too preoccupied with their own lives to give anybody else even the scantiest of thoughts.”

“I had been feeling permanently on the cusp of a flu, feeling at that point where I just wanted to borrow somebody else's coat- borrow somebody else's life- their aura. I seemed to have lost the ability to create any more aura on my own.”

“Jason once told me that eye contact is the most intimacy two people can have -- forget sex -- because the optic nerve is technically an extension of the brain, and when two people look into each other's eyes, it's brain-to-brain.”

“And I think back over my own life and I realize that my own nature-the core me-essentially hasn’t changed all these years. When I wake up in the morning, for those first few moments before I remember where I am or when I am, I still feel that same way I did when I woke up at the age of five.”

“I didn't realize then that so much of being adult is reconciling ourselves with the awkwardness and strangeness of our own feelings. Youth is the time of life lived for some imaginary audience.”