“Like all familiar objects, it had become invisible.”

“There was once an invisible man who had grown tired of being unseen. It was not that he was actually invisible. It was that people had become used to not seeing him. And if no one sees you, are you really there at all?"”

“Marriage is those two thousand indistinguishable conversations, chatted over two thousand indistuinguishable breakfasts, where intimacy turns like a slow wheel. How do you measure the worth of becoming that familiar to somebody—so utterly well known and so thoroughly ever-present that you become an almost invisible necessity, like air?”

“The familiar was usually invisible; how many people really noticed everything they saw?”

“Illness isolates; the isolated become invisible; the invisible become forgotten. But the snail....the snail kept my spirit from evaporating.”

“You do all you can to humanize and familiarize the world, and suddenly it becomes more strange than ever.”