“I've attempted suicide five times, and I've been successful every time.”

“What a twisted, twisted place, I think in retrospect… and yet when it was all happening back then, and for many days after I emerged, I couldn’t help but wonder if perhaps it had actually been the straightest place I’d ever visited.”

“Her morning bus was due to arrive any minute, if she hadn’t already missed it. But Sascha was the type of girl who heard incidental music when she walked, and the score surrounding this timid, old cat was much more alluring than the dreary notes surrounding her bus ride.”

“But that was all teachers ever did, wasn’t it? They grew and grew and grew until they wondered if they were the only ones growing, and then they shrank and shrank and shrank… and all the while the children grew sharper.”

“Who I am hates who I've been.”

“Think about this: in all the stories I've ever heard, genies always want to get out of the bottle. And they do get out, sooner or later.”

“There's a sameness to streetlife. On every world I've ever been, the same underlying patterns play out, flaunt and vaunt, buy and sell, like some distilled essence of human behavior seeping out from whatever clanking political machine has been dropped on it from above.”