“The one thing that worries me is that with my mother gone, the voice in my head that tells me to be nice to others has been silenced forever. I fear for other people.”

“We fall into each other. All the other voices in my head--the fear, the doubt, the worry--are drowned out. I die at the end of each kiss and am brought gasping back to life at the beginning of the next. I close my eyes and the entire world fades away.”

“I remember my mother telling me earlier that we are nothing more than our stories. I look at the masses of dead flesh, at all the stories that are now forever silenced.”

“But while my inner voice was clearly telling me I was at my core an entrepreneur, it's inconvenient to decide at twenty-three that you can't really work for other people.”

“I knew that somehow this loneliness was linked to all my other fears and worries and premonitions and to my sense, that fall, of the terrible fragility of everything around me.”

“The things other people have put into my head, at any rate, do not fit together nicely, are often useless and ugly, are out of proportion with one another, are out of proportion with life as it really is outside my head.”