“...my house contains every useless thing in the world. it lacks only the one essential, a piece of sky like this one...”

“Perhaps not one religion contains all of the truth of the world. Perhaps every religion contains fragments of the truth, and it is our responsibility to identify those fragments and piece them together.”

“Men are essentially useless for the difficult things in life. For births and deaths, one clearheaded woman is more useful than a half-dozen men.”

“The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.”

“Holding the knife with the blade against my palm, it became so clear how my life would only contain shadows now. Shadows of things gone; not just the people themselves but everything connected to them. Was this my future? Every moment, every tiny thing I saw and did and touched, weighted by loss. Every space in this house andmy town and the world in general, empty in a way that could never be filled.”

“With a brain working and a body working one could keep step with the crowd and never be found out for the hollow machine, lacking the essential thing, that one was conscious of being.”