If you don’t write the book you have to write, everything breaks.

Books tell you more about their owners than the owners do.

How can I tell anyone that there has always lived within me a rusty sense of disgust-a dull, brackish water that I suspect is my soul?

Suffering is normal. Pain is normal, it is part of life... What is its texture, the weight of our suffering? What is its meaning? Begin by touching it, by coming close to it, accepting it: Hello, suffering, I am here with you. I am beside you, one with you, I am you. I am suffering.

Make the mental physical, and the physical mental, and things will improve.

Was this the big one or was this the small tremor, the warning? Does it get better - does the sensation of being in a dream underwater go away?

He laid there realizing how thoroughly he'd removed himself from the world or obligations, how stupidly independent he'd become: he needed no one, knew no one, was not a part of anyone's life. He'd so thoroughly removed himself from the world of dependencies and obligations, he wasn't sure he still existed.

I don't know anything anymore. Is that normal? Is it normal to notice the enormity of everything and just go blank?

There is a world out there, so new, so random and disassociated that it puts us all in danger. We talk online, we ‘friend’ each other when we don’t know who we are really talking to – we fuck strangers. We mistake almost anything for a relationship, a community of sorts, and yet, when we are with our families, in our communities, we are clueless, we short-circuit and immediately dive back into the digitized version – it is easier, because we can be both our truer selves and our fantasy selves all at once, with each carrying equal weight.

The subjects range from the pastoral (sniffing of the butt of a melon to tell if it's ripe. and almost romantically lush descriptions of lightening storms sweeping across fields on summer nights) to elaborations on the value of man's having a life of his own, apart from whatever life he has with his family, a private life that no one knows anything about, "a place he can be himself without concern of disappointment or rejection".

Suddenly, she doesn't want to die. She has no real reason not to, no sudden revelation, except that it's equally pointless to die as not to die. Why doesn't she die? She lives because she's meant to live, because she's already alive and it's comparatively easy to stay that way. She lives because, even though she doesn't know what it is, there must be a reason why she's here in the first place. She lives because either she's not as brave as all the dead girls who've gone before her, or she's actually braver - it's hard to tell.

For the first time, I understand that, as much as one might desire change, one has to be willing to take a risk, to free-fall, to fail, and that you've got to let go of the past.

There are strangers, people we don't know, who care about is.

It's a strange city... filled with things that are not obvious.