Maybe she thought the garbage and rocks in your head were interesting. But finally, garbage is garbage and rocks are rocks.

A regular wind-up toy world this is, I think. Once a day the wind-up bird has to come and wind the springs of this world. Alone in this fun house, only I grow old, a pale softball of death swelling inside me. Yet even as I sleep somewhere between Saturn and Uranus, wind-up birds everywhere are busy at work fulfilling their appointed rounds.

What I was chasing in circles must have been the tail of the darkness inside me.

The best musicians transpose consciousness into sound; painters do the same for color and shape.

Have you ever had that feeling—that you’d like to go to a whole different place and become a whole different self?

I can be hurt, you know. I can get as exhausted as anybody else. I can feel so bad I want to cry, too.

A certain something, he felt, had managed to work its way in through a tiny opening and was trying to fill a blank space inside him. The void was not one that she had made. It had always been there inside him. She had merely managed to shine a special light on it.