“In a rush, the world opened its mouth to her—and it was screaming.Everywhere—the air around her, the ground beneath her, the stars above—rippled with the soul-wrenching cries ofhunger: the trees and bushes and plants all twisted and bent, their branches and stems clawing the sky in skeletal panic; theanimals and insects, flying and crawling and burrowing, each frantic in its own way, searching incessantly to end the gnawingdemand in its belly; the swarms of people, clotting the world, stuffing themselves only to beg for more, be it food or wealth orattention—all of them, desperate, insatiable. So very hungry.All of them, leeching on to her. Sucking her dry.”

“It began with the twitch of her lower lip as it took on a life of its own, rippling outward to the corners of her mouth and forcing them upward into a helpless smile. She instantly clasped one hand over her mouth in a frantic attempt to silence the sound that was coming from her throat. The result was that she half-spluttered, half-coughed, her eyes painfully wide as she desperately wished a hole would emerge in the oriental carpet and mercifully swallow her up.”

“She was afraid of all that and so much more, but what terrified her most was inside of her, an insect of unnatural intelligence who’d been living in her brain her entire life, playing with it, clicking across it, wrenching loose its cables on a whim.”

“She feels like someone has planted a tree in her chest and then pressed fast foward on the world, branches growing and twisting and pushing her apart from the inside.”

“He let her get almost all the way there, just staring, before he stumbled towards her. They ended in a rush and then fell to the ground together,arms locked around each other, each holding on as tightly as possible. Niether of them said a word.”

“I don't think the world is the way we like to think it is. I don't think it's one solid world, but many, thousands upon thousands of them--as many as there are people--because each person perceives the world in his or her own way; each lives in his or her own world. Sometimes they connect, for a moment, or more rarely, for a lifetime, but mostly we are alone, each living in our own world, suffering our small deaths.”