You realize you have no control over how you're perceived.

All you can do is hope for a pattern to emerge, and sometimes it never does. Still, with a plan, you only get the best you can imagine. I'd always hoped for something better than that.

It's my petty fear of personal rejection that allows so many true evils to exist. My cowardice enables atrocities.

If people thought you were dying, they gave you their full attention.

Sex pretty much cures everything.

With insomnia, you're never really awake; but you're never really asleep.

I didn't use anybody's story. I used the context and the structure of the situation. People were so, so desperate to tell their story and begin to digest their experience - like turning it into a story - that after the fist few weeks I could go with a pad and pencil and take notes. People didn't seem at all bothered by that.