Everything is the way it is because we've all agreed that's the way it is.

[She] had felt straight away that she wasn’t meeting a new friend, but recognizing an old one.

We're all made of stories. When they finally put us underground, the stories are what will go on.

From the first time he'd met her, he'd sensed an air of contradiction about her. She was very much a woman, but still retained a waiflike quality. She could be brash, and at times deliberately suggestive, yet she was painfully shy. She was incredibly easy to get along with, yet she had few friends. She was a talented artist in her own right, but so self-conscious about her work that she rarely completed a piece and preferred to work with other people's art and ideas.

I wouldn't like to live in a world where everything's as cut-and-dried as most people think it is

Most times we only see things for the way we are. But we're good at lying to ourselves. Sometimes we need somebody who's not living in our skin to point out how things really are.

We're so quick to cut away pieces of ourselves to suit a particular relationship, a job, a circle of friends, incessantly editing who we are until we fit in.