“There is a face beneath this mask, but it isn't me. I'm no more that face than I am the muscles beneath it, or the bones beneath that.”

“Behind this mask there is more than just flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea... and ideas are bulletproof.”

“You wear a mask for so long, you forget who you were beneath it.”

“Gage appears beneath me. 'Jump, and I'll catch you.' 'No.' I strengthen my death grip on the trunk of the tree. 'I'm very afraid of heights. I'll need hours of therapy to repair the damage done here today.' ”

“I say what other people only think, and when all the rest of the world is in a conspiracy to accept the mask for the true face, mine is the rash hand that tears off the plump pasteboard, and shows the bare bones beneath.”

“I sat on the bed. I looked at the Rorschach blot. I tried to make it look like a spreading tree, shadows pooled beneath it, but it didn't. It looked more like a dead cat I once found, the fat, glistening grubs writhing blindly, squirming over each other, frantically tunneling away from the light. But even that isn't the real horror. The horror is this: in the end, it is simply a picture of empty meaningless blackness.”

“..he understood far more deeply than anyone else the loneliness that lurked beneath his jaunty mask.”