“I realised something important: whatever is on the outside can be taken away at any time. Only what is inside you is safe.”

“What they held was already inside me, and together we could get away. And standing over the smoldering pile of paper and type, still warm the next cold morning, I understood that there was something else I could do. "Fuck it," I thought, "I can write my own.”

“The trouble with babies is that they are made like a safe- no way to see what's inside and no guarantee that the effort will be worth the trouble. spin the numbers, crack the code, but the door won't swing open. Babies are safes on time-delay. It takes years for the door to swing open, and even when it does, the best minds are undecided as to the value of the contents”

“Infatuation. First Love. Lust. My passion can be explained away. But this is sure: Whatever she touches, she reveals.”

“Lies 1: There is only the present and nothing to remember.Lies 2: Time is a straight line.Lies 3: The difference between the past and the future is that one has happened while the other has not.Lies 4: We can only be in one place at a time.Lies 5: Any proposition that contains the word 'finite' (the world, the universe, experience, ourselves...)Lies 6: Reality as something which can be agreed upon.Lies 7: Reality is truth.”

“Six books… my mother didn’t want books falling into my hands. It never occurred to her that I fell into the books – that I put myself inside them for safe keeping.”

“There are times when it will go so wrong that you will barely be alive, and times when you realise that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else's terms.”