“The best way to think about reality, I had decided, was to get as far away from it as possible.”

“It feels like everything's been decided in advance that I'm following a path somebody else has already mapped out for me. It doesn't matter how much I think things over, how much effort I put into it. In fact, the harder I try, the more I lose my sense of who I am. It's like my identity's an orbit that I've strayed far away from, and that really hurts. But more than that, it scares me. Just thinking about it makes me flinch.”

“No matter how far you travel, you can never get away from yourself.”

“That’s all I think about these days. Must be because I have so much time to kill every day. When you don’t have anything to do, your thoughts get really, really far out-so far outyou can’t follow them all the way to the end.”

“Possibilities are like cancer. The more I think about them, the more they multiply, and there's no way to stop them. I'm out of control. ”

“You said you're going far away," Tamaru said. "How far away are we talking about?""It's a distance that can't be measured.""Like the distance that separates one person's heart from another's.”

“I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. But it was not until much later that I was able to get any real sleep. In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment.”