“This way of behaving, this way of feeling, so hysterical, so sad, when someone has died, I don't like at all and would like to avoid. It's not as if the whole thing has not happened before, it's not as if people have not been dying all along and each person left behind is the first person ever left behind in the world. What to make of it? Why can’t everybody just get used to it? People are born and they just can’t go on and on, but it is so hard, so hard for the people left behind; it’s so hard to see them go, as if it had never happened before, and so hard it could not happen to anyone else, no one but you could survive this kind of loss, seeing someone go, seeing them leave you behind; you don't want to go with them, you only don't want them to go.”

“I'm not scared anymore, I just ... I don't know. I think it's because I saw someone else, someone behind your face, like you'd taken off a mask. It was still you, but it wasn't. And I don't think that person is going to hurt me, or Marci, or anybody else, but ... I guess the thing is that I don't know anything about that person. At all. And that's what scares me more than anything - that there could be two people, so different, and one of them so secret.”

“I never knew a building could hold so much inside.. . . I saw my town as if I had just arrived. It was as if I was waking up. You see houses and buildings every day, and you walk by them on your way to something else, and you hardly see. You hardly notice they're even there, mostly because there's something else going on right in front of your face. But when the town itself becomes the thing that is going on right in front of your face, it all changes, and you're not just looking at a house but at what's happened in that house before you were born.”

“No matter how much you love someone sometimes it is better to totally disassociate yourself from them for peace of mind. Delete all memories of them no matter how hard it is to do so, to leave no reminders of them floating around, in order to make it easier to get over that person. As much as you want to run to that person grab them and tell them how much you still want them in your life whether it's friendship or otherwise it is best to see if that person still wants you in their life. After you have gotten rid of all memories, all associations, all communications if that person happens to reappear then your friendship/relationship was a true one and should continue. If after you cut all ties and you never see that person again then you know you did the right thing by letting them go. Cause if they really wanted you in their life they would not allow you to let them go so easily to begin with.”

“So hard to die.' I don't doubt that it is, but it cannot be much harder than being left behind.”

“Its so hard to talk when you want to kill yourself. That's above and beyond everything else, and it's not a mental complaint-it's a physical thing, like it's physically hard to open your mouth and make the words come out. They don't come out smooth and in conjunction with your brain the way normal people's words do; they come out in chunks as if from a crushed-ice dispenser; you stumble on them as they gather behind your lower lip. So you just keep quiet.”