I live my own life and nurse my own wounds. It's not the best way to live. But it's the way I am.

Historical fact: People stopped being people in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we've all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joy-sticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds.

I went into the desert to forget about you. But the sand was the color of your hair. The desert sku was the color of your eyes. There was nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you.

So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love.

You never get over it, but you get to where it doesn't bother you so much.

We listened to them, but it was clear they'd received too much therapy to know the truth.

That was when Leonard realized something crucial about depression. The smarter you were, the worse it was. The sharper your brain, the more it cut you up.