“I thought everyone would be familiar with this figure: if I'd studied a thing in school I assumed it was general knowledge. I hadn't yet discovered that I lived in a sort of transparent balloon, drifting over the world without making much contact with it, and that the people I knew appeared to me at a different angle from the one at which they appeared to themselves; and that the reverse was also true. I was smaller to others, up there in my balloon, than I was to myself. I was also blurrier.”

“I've since come to believe that the world is populated by multitudes of women sitting at windows, inseparable from their surroundings. I myself spent many hours at a window on the Zattere, waiting for my father's return, waiting for my life to appear like one of those great ships that came into the harbor, broad sails filled with the wind of providence...I'd grown transparent as the glass through which I peered, dangerously invisible even to myself. It was then I knew I must set my life in motion or I would disappear.”

“I stopped wanting to float away from my life, because in the end my life was all I had. I'd walk the Fairmont campus and look up to the sky and I wouldn't see myself drifting off like some lost balloon. Instead I saw the size of the world and found comfort in its hugeness. I'd think back to those times when I felt like everything was closing in on me, those times when I thought I was stuck, and I realized that I was wrong. There is always hope. The world is vast and meant for wandering. There is always somewhere else to go.”

“I also took a stab at drawing a Novem-Bear. I don't know what a Novem is, but I assumed it meant "balloon salesman." And the Novem-Bear has tentacles because it should.”

“I had a lot of things I wanted to do… I want to be a teacher…I also want to be an astronaut…and also make my own cake shop…I want to go to the sweets bakery and say “I want one of everything”, ohhhh I wish I could live life five times over…Then I’d be born in five different places, and I’d stuff myself with different food from around the world…I’d live five different lives with five different occupations…and then, for those five times…I’d fall in love with the same person…”

“It was one of the most sublimely exhilarating moments of my life. I was half a step in front of the real, an inch or two beyond the confines of my body, and when the thing happened just as I thought it would, I felt my skin had become transparent. I wasn't occupying space anymore so much as melting into it. What was around me was also inside me, and I had only to look into myself in order to see the world.”