“I could tell by their audible gasps that the people on the beach were jealous of me when I found five shark's teeth. Locating them wasn't really the problem, but pulling them out of my leg was.”

“That ain't me, that ain't my face. It wasn't even me when I was trying to be that face. I wasn't even really me them; I was just being the way I looked, the way people wanted.”

“Fortunately, he'd found that most people were easy to locate at five thirty in the morning.”

“I thought how you can never tell just by looking at them what they were thinking or what was happening In their lives. Even when you got daft people or drunk people on buses, people that went on stupid and shouted rubbish or tried to tell you all about themselves, you could never really tell about them either... I knew if somebody looked at me, they'd know nothing about me, either.”

“I knew books could see people around them, they ground their tiny teeth, tried to rattle like windows, stories to tell.”

“I didn't avoid my problems. I just didn't feel as though I had to focus on them every minute of every day. And telling people about certain aspects of my life would only create trouble. If I was guilty of anything, it was of trying not to bring new problems into my life. That wasn't avoidance. That was logical thinking.”