“Somewhere along the line I began compiling myself from the excerpts of better men.”

“My worst kiss could have been an outtake from Species. I think she thought my epiglottis was a punching bag.”

“There have been so many times I felt like I've ended the conversation lately I've decided that if I had a Wu Tang name it'd be Threadkilla. ”

“sassysnacks!”

“Eating was a welcome distraction, not for us but for them. However the piles on the plates clashed (macaroni cheese sauce oozing orangely under the spinach salad), however sour the mixtures they made (runaway grapes rolling in the gravy!), our guests chewed to prove that their existence hadn't been diverted. For the price of a quick casserole, they bribed us into agreeing that this was God's plan, life was going on. Their cliches were breath mints: they wanted us to suck away to sweeten the bad taste our misfortune left in their mouths. And so we did.”

“Rousseau and his disciples were resolved to force men to be free; in most of the world, they triumphed; men are set free from family, church, town, class, guild; yet they wear, instead, the chains of the state, and they expire of ennui or stifling lone lines.”

“It's reasonable to try for success. Paradoxically, it's also sane to admit defeat. This excels the coming of the end. And when that tide has crested and broken, it recedes from the shore to leave behind something of principle significance. An artefact borne from the lunatic fight. The human struggle. And I can see myself, not too far into the future, with my hair whipping about in the fray of coastal spray, arching low to pick up that wriggling, billion-limbed nautilus, to hold it to my winter-cold ear, to hear what I could hear.”