"I will describe my eyes and then begin the story. My eyes are blue and resplendent. Now I will begin the story."

"Grandfather informs me that is not possible."

"Anyway.I’m not allowed to watch TV, although I am allowed to rent documentaries that are approved for me, and I can read anything I want. My favorite book is A Brief History of Time, even though I haven’t actually finished it, because the math is incredibly hard and Mom isn’t good at helping me. One of my favorite parts is the beginning of the first chapter, where Stephen Hawking tells about a famous scientist who was giving a lecture about how the earth orbits the sun, and the sun orbits the solar system, and whatever. Then a woman in the back of the room raised her hand and said, “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” So the scientist asked her what the tortoise was standing on. And she said, “But it’s turtles all the way down!”I love that story, because it shows how ignorant people can be. And also because I love tortoises."

"Succotash my cocker spaniel, you fudging crevasse-hole dipshiitake!"

"If we were to one day encounter a form of life more powerful and intelligent than our own, and it regarded us as we regard fish, what would be our argument against being eaten?"

"...people with nothing to declare carry the most."

"I want an infinitely blank book and the rest of time......why didn't I learn to treat everything like it was the last time, my greatest regret is how much I believed in the future."

"There's nothing wrong with not understanding yourself."

"It has shown me that everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us...on the inside, looking out."

"She was like a drowning person, flailing, reaching for anything that might save her. Her life was an urgent, desperate struggle to justify her life."

"The mistakes I've made are dead to me. But I can't take back the things I never did."

"I am always sad, I think. Perhaps this signifies that I am not sad at all, because sadness is something lower than your normal disposition, and I am always the same thing. Perhaps I am the only person in the world, then, who never becomes sad. Perhaps I am lucky."

"I don't think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem."

"I'm sorry for my inability to let unimportant things go, for my inability to hold on to the important things."

"It was not the feeling of completeness I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty."

"Why didn't I learn to treat everything like it was the last time. My greatest regret was how much I believed in the future."

"Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living."

"(What are your ghosts like?)(They are on the insides of the lids of my eyes.)(This is also where my ghosts reside.)(You have ghosts?)(Of course I have ghosts.)(But you are a child.)(I am not a child.)(But you have not known love.)(These are my ghosts, the spaces amid love.)"

"She let out a laugh, and then she put her hand over her mouth, like she was angry at herself for forgetting her sadness."

"He promised us that everything would be okay. I was a child, but I knew that everything would not be okay. That did not make my father a liar. It made him my father."

"Brod's life was a slow realization that the world was not for her, and that for whatever reason, she would never be happy and honest at the same time. She felt as if she were brimming, always producing and hoarding more love inside her. But there was no release...So she had to satisfy herself with the idea of love--loving the loving of things whose existence she didn't care at all about. Love itself became the object of her love. She loved herself in love, she loved loving love, as love loves loving, and was able, in that way, to reconcile herself with a world that fell so short of what she would have hoped for. It was not the world that was the great and saving lie, but her willingness to make it beautiful and fair, to live a once-removed life, in a world once-removed from the one in which everyone else seemed to exist."

"I went to a tattoo parlor and had YES written onto the palm of my left hand, and NO onto my right palm, what can I say, it hasn't made my life wonderful, its made life possible, when I rub my hands against each other in the middle of winter I am warming myself with the friction of YES and NO, when I clap my hands I am showing my appreciation through the uniting and parting of YES and NO, I signify "book" by peeling open my hands, every book, for me, is the balance of YES and NO, even this one, my last one, especially this one. Does it break my heart, of course, every moment of every day, into more pieces than my heart was made of, I never thought of myself as quiet, much less silent, I never thought about things at all, everything changed, the distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasn't the world, it wasn't the bombs and burning buildings, it was me, my thinking, the cancer of never letting go, is ignorance bliss, I don't know, but it's so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think, I've thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it."