“Life was a small negative space cut out of the eternal solidity, and for the first time, it felt precious - not like all of the words that had come to mean nothing, but like the last breath of a drowning victim.”

“It was the first time I had ever made love. I wondered if he knew that. It felt like crying. I wondered, Why does anyone ever make love?”

“I would have done anything for him. Maybe that was my sickness. We made love in nothing places and turned the lights off. It felt like crying. We could not look at each other. It always had to be from behind. Like that first time. And I knew he wasn't thinking of me.He squeezed my sides so hard, and pushed so hard. Like he was trying to push me through to somewhere else.Why does anyone ever make love?”

“She was like a drowning person, flailing, reaching for anything that might save her. Her life was an urgent, desperate struggle to justify her life.”

“It took me as long as I had known him to get rid of all of his words. Like turning an hourglass over.”

“We talked about nothing in particular, but it felt like we were talking about the most important things...”

“A lot of the time I'd get that feeling like I was in the middle of a huge black ocean, or in deep space, but not in the fascinating way. It's just that everything was incredibly far away from me. It was worst at night. I started inventing things, and then I couldn't stop, like beavers, which I know about. People think they cut down trees so they can build dams, but in reality it's because their teeth never stop growing, and if they didn't constantly file them down by cutting through all of those trees, their teeth would start to grow into their own faces, which would kill them. That's how my brain was.”