“I told myself that I didn't need any of that shit, but there it was, repeated to me day after day after day. And when you're surrounded by a bunch of mostly strangers experiencing the same thing, unable to call home, tethered to routine on ranchland miles away from anybody who might have known you before, might have been able to recognize the real you if you told them you couldn't remember who she was, it's not really like being real at all. It's plastic living. It's living in a diorama. It's living the life of one of those prehistoric insects encased in amber: suspended, frozen, dead but not, you don't know for sure.”

“So go out and live real good and I promise you'll get beat up real bad. But, in a little while after you're dead, you'll be rotted away anyway. It's not gonna matter if you have a few scars. It will matter if you didn't live.”

“I pretended it was nothing. That day I told you about my baby, and why I had had an abortion. It would have damaged other lives. I had killed my own real baby ten years before, but it remains my living child, and will always be so. It is worse when there is no grave. I wanted you to recognize its existence. No one else does, and that is what I cannot bear.”

“No, it's just like when you're dead and you try to remember being alive, it'll be like thinking of winter on the hottest day of the year. You'll know it's true, but you won't really believe it.”

“Mine crept up on me instead of hitting me fast, but after a while, it was the same—so that if I didn't have a…a salve, I couldn't function, and I'd start planning my day around just getting it," she said quietly, and had to swallow before she continued. "And you tell yourself that it makes you feel good—but really, you're just getting by. Because you feel like shit with it, but you really feel like shit without it, so you need it to get through the day. And after a while, you‟re desperate to get through the day without it, but know that stopping will feel worse than going—and you don't know if you're clinging to it as much as it‟s clinging to you. But you‟re constantly looking for a way to get rid of it without hurting yourself…but there‟s no way. And eventually you hate it as much as you need it. (..) So I never, ever want to be anybody's salve.”

“The more you experience love, the more full of it you should be. But the opposite sometimes happens, because you fear the loss of life. You fear the vulnerability that can take the goodness of it away. This might have happened because when i was just a kid, i had the sense that your whole life can change with a death in the family. It's like they say - at least i say - It's the loss of money that leads to the love of it. You know, the people who care about money are never the people who made a lot. They're the people who have lost a lot. And I think that might be true in relationships, when if you've lost somebody important to you early on, you live in fear of that the rest of your life. I suppose that's one of the things that I would fear, and that might explain the rage you referred to earlier, which is real in me, at some point, it really is. An odd thing to own up to, but I do know it's true.”