“My brain scrambled to make room for the existene of these people. Grandparents I'd never known. They went from hypothetical, empty memories to blurry, unformed shapes in my head. Dead one second, alive the next.Kind of like me.”

“Head's all empty, I don't care,' he'd sing to me, quoting the Grateful Dead, and I'd force a smile, thinking that my head was never empty and that if it ever was, you could be darn sure I'd care.”

“Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That's when I will be truly dead - when I exist in no one's memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies, the whole cluster dies, too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?”

“The thought of my mother talking to me about sex makes me want to stab my eyes out with a fork, gouge even deeper and scramble my brains to prevent the conversation from ever happening.”

“I like living in one room and have never known what people do with the room they are not in.”

“Drawing things makes them seem more real and makes me feel more alive. It also makes me pin down and remember things - landscapes, season, weather, occasions, incidents, people - that would otherwise have melted from my memory.”