“I’d love to step off this well-trodden straight and boring path. To somehow live differently, think different thoughts, feel different feelings than others. It wouldn’t bother me to be as alone as a tree on the plains. My leaves would be like no other tree’s.”

“You know what I was thinking about on my way home? How different my life would be if you’d made that gash a little deeper. Or how different yours would be if I’d vaulted myself off a roof nine years ago. Do you ever think about things like that? Like, if either you or I wouldn’t have made it, where would the other one be right now? It was something I thought about all the time: how death changes every remaining moment for those still living.”

“I would give anything to escape myself, Flynn thought, just for a day, just for a minute even. Just to know what it was like to think differently, to feel differently, and to not be me.”

“Barnabas’s voice helps me drift off to sleep. I think briefly about how I’ve never felt this way about anyone else. I care about my family and friends, but this is a different feeling. This must be how my father feels about my mother. This must be what it feels like to be in love. Somehow, I’m certain.I know I can’t leave him here to rot. I can’t leave him at all.”

“I couldn't love anyone more than I do you, it would kill me. And I couldn't love anyone less because it would always feel like less. Even if I loved some other girl, that's all I would ever think about, the difference between loving her and loving you.”

“Often I've thought of myself as a state; a country or, at the very least, a city. It used to seem to me that the different ways I felt sometimes about ideas, courses of action and so on were like the differing political moods that countries go through. It has always seemed to me that people vote in a new government not because they actually agree with their politics but just because they want a change. Somehow they think that things will be better under the new lot. Well, people are stupid, but it all seems to have more to do with mood, caprice and atmosphere than carefully thought-out arguments. I can feel the same sort of thing going on in my head. Sometimes the thoughts and feelings I had didn't really agree with each other, so I decided I must be lots of different people inside my brain.”