“I felt the first soft glow of intoxication that makes the blood warmer and spreads an illusion of adventure over uncertainty.”

“For the first time in my life, I felt a gentleness, a softness in the unfolding of each day.”

“Uncertainty makes people anxious, and distraction is the twenty-first century opiate of the masses.”

“I felt like I'd been swimming so hard, and the water growing warmer and warmer the closer I got to the top. I wasn't there yet, but now I could see the surface, rippling just beyond my fingers.”

“It is an eternal phenomenon: the insatiable will always finds a way to detain its creatures in life and compel them to live on, by means of an illusion spread over things.”

“There was something intoxicating about this. I kept wanting to laugh, just at the lavish giddy freedom of it: relatives and countries and possibilities spread out in front of me and I could pick whatever I wanted, I could grow up in a palace in Bhutan with seventeen brothers and sisters and a personal chauffeur if I felt like it.”