“The past was suddenly rushing in on me in a way I found hard to fight.”

“But I can hardly remember what it felt like. It's like everything that happens to you. It doesn't feel real.”

“The thought of all that happiness was hard to bear. What's the point of happiness when all it does is throw the facts of dying into clear relief?”

“If not just the brain but the quirks that made the individual were composed of recycled matter only, it was hard to be sure where the edges of one such being ended and another person began.”

“Sometimes my whole life seems like a dream; occasionally I think that someone else has lived it for me. The events and the sensations, the stories and the things that make me what I am in the eyes of other people, the list of facts that make my life ... They could be mine, they might be yours.”

“All reality about me now appeared to be in tatters, taken down and reduced to the civil war of its particles. I held on very, very tight indeed.”

“I'd never chosen to be alone, but that was the way things had turned out, and I'd grown used to it.”