Constipation was one of the things she hated most in the world, on par with despicable men who commit domestic violence and narrow-minded religious fundamentalists.

The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.

In his or her own way, everyone I saw before me looked happy. Whether they were really happy or just looked it, I couldn't tell. But they did look happy on this pleasant early afternoon in late September, and because of that I felt a kind of loneliness new to me, as if I were the only one here who was not truly part of the scene.

Grandfather always said school’s a place where they take sixteen years to wear down your brain. Grandfather hardly went to school either.

I didn't feel like I was in my own body; my body was just a lonely, temporary container I happened to be borrowing.

This place is too calm, too natural--too complete. I don't deserve it. At least not yet.

Memories and thoughts age, just as people do. But certain thoughts can never age, and certain memories can never fade.