“A voluntary act to fill empty hours had become intensive labor streaked with the bad feelings that ride the skin like pollen when too much about one's neighbors is known.”

“I’ve been grasping at nothing, running in circles, trying desperately to fill the emptiness inside with nothing but air. If I think about it too much, I feel shame, so much shame. So I don’t.”

“By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better.”

“How far is too far? When you love a band so much that its songs fill the empty spaces inside your head and heart, is that too far?”

“She had had insomnia badly when she was fresh from Home.... She had had only occasional bad nights since then. Bad? she thought. Why bad? I rarely feel much the worse the next day, except for a sort of moral irritability that seems to go with the feeling that I ought to have spent all those silent hours asleep.”

“The emptiness is so intense, that anything which enters it leaves a trace, something of it remains in space: in the silence, in the whiteness, nothingness becomes peopled, too.”