"Then, almost as an afterthought, she turned and locked the bathroom door. If he thought he was going to seduce her, make her stupid enough to believe his lies by getting her into bed, he'd better think again. She stepped into the water. Besides, women didn't lose brain cells at the thought of sex. Only men did."

"Since we all know that death is inevitable, I don't really see the difference between dying now and dying a decade later. So if I'm threatened with assassination, I welcome it!"

"I have noticed that when people tell their own stories, often it has less to do with wanting to communicate an idea to another than with clarifying an emotion to themselves. Or when the subject of the story is beloved and missing, as a way to make them here and alive."

"I’ve lost control of the simple act of being able to breathe. I’m hyperventilating. “I don’t need you to show me how to breathe,” I say. “You don’t?” He looks skeptical. “I think I can handle the simple act of breathing without you."

"I know that I'm going to die and that you're going to die. I can't do anything about that. But I can explore it through a metaphor and make a kind of funny, dark story about it, and in doing so, really exhaust and research as many aspects of it as I can imagine. And in a way, that does give me some closure."

"He ached for creation. For life to somehow rise from the drawings in his sketching book. For his own energy, his own impressions to swirl and spin on a canvas. For a dream city he had tacked above his bed."

"The essence of death is discovered in the gap between one moment ceasing and another one beginning. That essence is the wakefulness that is our true nature."