“I had hoped to be disliked by most, not by way of rebellion, but by way of excellence, disdain for the habitual, and the common man’s inability to grasp this. The act of being scorned? I saw it as a victory, my irreverent boast against this world which could never fully quench me.”

“If there is any irreverence in my own work, I hope it is the irreverence I bear in mistrusting my own sincere self, which then sincerely mistrusts the irreverent me. If there is a bottom to this, I think it is a life’s work.”

“But it never worked that way, and the sex just made her lonelier. I understood that, as it had made me lonelier too. I could never remember being lonely, certainly not in this way, until I had seen the edge of the ways you could be with another person, which brought up all the myriad ways that person could never be there for you.”

“I once saw many flowers blooming Upon my way, in indolence I scorned to pick them in my going And passed in proud indifference. Now, when my grave is dug, they taunt me; Now, when I'm sick to death in pain, In mocking torment still they haunt me, Those fragrant blooms of my disdain.”

“The resentment I felt inside was not hatred for being imprisoned or for Victor who had betrayed me but something deeper: a rebellion against the very way of things that condemned men to be imprisoned inside their own identities.”

“Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.”