“Imagine there was a cure, but finding it would cost you everything. It would completely ruin your life. What would you do?”

“When you are thirteen, you spend all your time imagining what it would be like to live in a world where you could pay a robot for sex. And that sex would cost a dollar. And the only obstacle to getting that sex would be making sure you had four quarters.Then you grow up and it turns out you do live in that kind of world. A world with coin-operated sexbots. And it's not really as great as you thought it would be.”

“I started thinking about life insurance and how nice it would be if you could get insurance that your life would be happy, and that everyone you knew could be happy, and they could all do what they really wanted to do, and they could all find the people they wanted to find.”

“The walls were coming down around me, but still, I couldn't imagine telling the truth. Not now. It was too late. How can I tell Mom and Dad what we'd done? It would ruin everything. It would ruin their image of me; it would ruin every thought they'd ever had about who I was. It would be another death.Another loss. Another miscarriage.”

“Can you imagine what it would be like to know that your life was just going to be a series of days that were all the same, that were do-overs?”

“Oh, if I had been loved at the age of seventeen, what an idiot I would be today. Happiness is like smallpox: if you catch it too soon, it can completely ruin your constitution.”