This was freedom. Losing all hope was freedom.

Our real discoveries come from chaos, from going to the place that looks wrong and stupid and foolish.

During the First World War, I told her, Hitler had been a runner, delivering messages between the German trenches, and he was disgusted by seeing his fellow soldiers visit French brothels. To keep the Aryan bloodlines pure,and prevent the spread of venereal disease, he commissioned an inflatable doll that Nazi troops could take into battle. Hitler himself designed the dolls to have blond hair and large breasts. The Allied firebombing of Dresden destroyed the factory before the dolls could ever go into wide distribution.

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, doesn't it just lie there and rot?

Each wedding picture was less of a memento than a scar. Proof of some horror movie scenario Katherine Kenton has survived.

As a lower-class kid, I was raised to think success would be owning stuff. Having that great job, too. Now I find my parents' dream was wrong. You never really own anything. And you're never really finished as a person.

It's pathetic how we can't live with the things we can't understand. How we need everything labeled and explained and deconstructed.