“When it came time to die, we knew and went to deep yards where we lay down and our bones turned to brass. We were picked over. We were used to fix broken clocks, music boxes; our pelvises were fitted onto pinions, our spines soldered into cast works. Our ribs were fitted as gear teeth and tapped and clicked like tusks. This is how, finally, we were joined.”

“All this time I'd thought we were strangers, and it turned out we knew each other intuitively, in our bones, in our blood. It was kind of romantic. Catastrophically romantic.”

“When we first came hereWe were cold and we were clearwith no colours on our skinWe were light and paper thin.And when we first came hereWe were cold and we were clearWith no colours on our skin'Till you let the Spectrum in.--Spectrum”

“Jules and I were tiny people. We were delicate. We were almost destroyed. We were vulnerable. Like nerds in a school yard of bullies, we could have traded our stamps and cards of extinct animals. That’s the kind of people we would be if our situation were different.”

“As a parent? My fear is that when we die, we'll have to watch all those moments in our lives when we were short-tempered with our children, all the times they needed our love and and we didn't give it, all those times we were distracted, or in a bad mood, all the times we were angry or impatient.”

“In a strange way we were free. We'd reached the end of the line. We had nothing more to lose. Our privacy, our liberty, our dignity: all of this was gone and we were stripped down to the bare bones of our selves”