“But what little I’d heard had left me amazed by how clever people were at finding ways to make each other crazy and miserable.”

“But I had a feeling I wasn't supposed to find her that way. She was not a needle. This was not a haystack. We were people, and people had ways of finding each other.”

“And it's amazing how much noise people ignoring each other can make.”

“What solitary people my family were! It amazed me that two of its members had ever gotten together to produce the others. But then solitary people pretending not to be – that must be how families start up, and how the race of the lonely has grown so numerous.”

“In his opinion, humans were best when miserable, and so he had worked at being miserable his whole life, and in his generous way tried to make as many people miserable as possible.”

“Initially, he worried that he might be going crazy. But then he decided if you felt you were crazy you weren't really crazy because he had heard somewhere that crazy people didn't know they were insane.”