I mean, he was something that happened to me, you know? But before he was this minor figure in the drama of my life he was - you know, the central figure in the drama of his own life.

I know that books seem like the ultimate thing that's made by one person, but that's not true. Every reading of a book is a collaboration between the reader and the writer who are making the story up together.

But if you consider all the unlikely things together, at least one of them will probably happen to each of us.

What is an "instant" death anyway? How long is an instant? Is it one second? Ten? The pain of those seconds must have been awful as her heart burst and her lungs collapsed and there was no air and no blood to her brain and only raw panic. What the hell is instant? Nothing is instant. Instant rice takes five minutes, instant pudding an hour. I doubt that an instant of blinding pain feels particularly instantaneous.

When it comes to girls (and in Colin's case, it so often did), everyone has a type. Colin Singleton's type was not physical but linguistic: he liked Katherines. And not Katies or Kats or Kitties or Cathys or Rynns or Trinas or Kays or Kates or, god forbid, Catherines. K-A-T-H-E-R-I-N-E. He had dated 19 girls. All of them had been named Katherine. And all of them- every single solitary one- had dumped him.

That was the worst part about having cancer, sometimes: The physical evidence of disease separates you from other people.

It's a metaphor, see: You put the killing thing right between your teeth, but you don't give it the power to do its killing.