“Yeah. I don’t need much, and whatever else I need I’m sure I can buy since the Council knows that I am the charmed one who has to be humored lest the big bad Norseman go a Viking on their heads. (Chris)”

“I need a boy who thinks with his big head, not his little one. Since they do not exist, I have fashioned my own.”

“I don’t know much about the world, but I do know one thing for sure. If I’m pessimistic, then the adults in this world who are not pessimistic are a bunch of idiots.”

“I only need to know one thing. Am I going to need the flamethrower?”

“Is it possible really to love other people? If I’m lonely and in pain, everyone outside me is potential relief—I need them. But can you really love what you need so badly? Isn’t a big part of love caring more about what the other person needs? How am I supposed to subordinate my own overwhelming need to somebody else’s needs that I can’t even feel directly? And yet if I can’t do this, I’m damned to loneliness, which I definitely don’t want … so I’m back at trying to overcome my selfishness for self-interested reasons.”

“I understood at once, I am not living, but actively dying. I am smoking, living unhealthily. I’m shutting down. I need to go the other way, inside. And it was so clear to me what I was doing. It was suddenly perfectly clear. I understood, I need to write. Live here, in my words, and my head. I need to go inside, that’s all. No big, complicated, difficult thing. I just need to go in reverse. And not worry about what to write about, but just write. Or, if I’m going to worry about what to write, then do this worrying on paper, so at least I’m writing and will have a record of the anxiety.”