“That can be the cruelest part of happiness--its tendency to disguise itself as boredom.”

“It’s weird like, you can see the cruelest part of the world. The cruelest part. But then on the other side you see the most beautiful part, do you know? And it’s like you go from one extreme to the next and they’re both worth it, because you wouldn’t see one without the other. But that cruel part, is damn cruel and you’ll never forget it. But that heaven…is heaven.”

“If you're not part of the freaks, you're part of the boredom.”

“People can be cruelest to those they love.”

“I looked out the window for other passengers in love with their drivers, but we were well disguised, we pretended boredom and prayed for traffic.”

“In freedom, every non-nomenklatura citizen knew perpetual hunger – the involuntary slurp and gulp of the esophagus. In camp, your hunger kicked as I imagine a fetus would kick. It was the same with boredom. And boredom, by now, has lost all its associations with mere lassitude and vapidity. Boredom is no longer the absence of emotion; it is itself an emotion, and a violent one. A silent tantrum of boredom.”