“Imagine if we were capable of a form of empathy that lets us know one another by savoring the aura we leave on the things we have touched. We would go to a dump to get drunk on one another's souls.”

“Garbage Is, always. We will die, civilization will crumble, life as we know it will cease to exist, but trash will endure, and there it was on the street, our ceaselessly erected, ceaselessly broken cenotaphs to ephemera and disconnection and unquenchable want.”

“Locked into loneliness were we two and looking at one another every evening we each saw the one we blamed for it.”

“What we can do, we must do: we must use what we are given, and we must use it the best we can, however much or little help we have for the task. What you have been given is a hard thing--a very hard thing... But my darling, what if there were no one who could do the difficult things?”

“Imagination runs out. But it makes sense, right? We probably just imagine things based on what we already know, and we run out of analogies in the thirty-first century.”

“Unfortunately, there's no getting around it: people have to work for their happiness. We go into battle every day, and we have to work to be happy. It just isn't handed over to us, as much as we wish it was.”

“We all have that moment in life when something terrible happens for the first time. Something so unexpected, so awful, that it takes the magic out of the world. Life becomes harder, colder. And everything we do in our lives, from that day on, is our way of coping with that one moment. We stop living and we merely exist. We either choose to move on from that, or we let it consume us.”