“One of the liberating effects of science fiction when I was a teenager was precisely its ability to tune me into all sorts of strange data and make me realize that I wasn’t as totally isolated in perceiving the world as being monstrous and crazy”

“It always shocked me when I realized that I wasn’t the only person in the world who thought and felt such strange and awful things.”

“I’ll always be broken,” I went on. “Because when I came here, no one fixed me. It’s not that they didn’t care to fix me. These crazy, wonderful people I met at Craneville didn’t fix me because they didn’t think I needed to be fixed. And it wasn’t because they were ‘crazy’…it was because they were the only people who knew that I could only face the world out there again as someone different. As someone who wasn’t perfect, who wasn’t normal, who didn’t have all the answers…someone who was somehow ‘fixed’ by being broken.”

“The tune was wailing and mournful, almost flagrantly so, and the total effect was of a heartbroken piccolo being parted forever from its bagpipe lover.”

“Science fiction at its best should be crazy and dangerous, not sane and safe.”

“I thought I had the world by the tail. It took me a few years to realize the closest I was to having the world by the tail was being a dingle berry on one of its ass hairs.”