“His insides are beginning to feel sickly. The pain of the world is a crater all these syrups and pills a thousandfold would fail to fill.”

“Adam is crying and somewhere inside of me I am crying, too, because I'm feeling things at last. I'm feeling not just the physical pain, but all that I have lost, and it is profound and catastrophic and will leave a crater in me that nothing will ever fill.”

“That our pains and longings are thousandfold and can be anesthetized in a thousand different ways is as commonplace a truth as that, in the end, they are all one, and can only be overcome in one way. What you most need is to feel...”

“All systems have failed me. In fiveminutes I'll be fine again for a while, but right now the inside of my head feels like NiagaraFalls without the noise, just this mist and churning and no real sense of where earth ends andheaven begins.”

“He's filled with a sense of childish release, the old feeling that because you are sick, all your trials and obligations have been suspended.”

“She had changed him. The ice was in his eyes and in his heart, like he had predicted with that song, but now they were deep embedded there, all the pain of the world. Not pain to make you feel for somebody else but pain to make you stop feeling.”