“Everything comes to nothing in the end, I suppose. Or at least, nothing happens exactly the way we imagine it.”

“Not only good to be alive, but nice to come with a stranger. Intimacy? For now I want nothing of it. I am simply trying to emerge from the violent unnecessariness of death.”

“She told herself that life is short. This didn't mean that nothing mattered, only that when strange things happened there was often no turning back.”

“In the act itself there is a point at which a light that comes from nowhere starts flickering like a strobe. What happens is not exactly a hallucination. But it wells up from deep in the earth and pounds through my body and there is nowhere to escape from its intensity.”

“And I come to realise that all my small todays, the way I act, will lead into my tomorrows.”

“We are all, I realise, even as I write this, merely moving closer to our deaths. At the end of this sentence I am closer to mine than I was at the beginning. It's relentless. It's a savage thing. And yet for a long time I've carried with me a sense of life opening out. Evidently it's some kind of protective illusion.”

“It is so exquisitely funny and sad, the way we view each other; how very little, despite our best efforts, we communicate.”