So she became impulsive, scared by her inaction into perpetual action.

This is unbearable ... God. These books she'll never read. Her Life's Library.

When we think of death, we often imagine it as happening in degrees: We think of a sick person becoming less and less alive until finally they are gone.

I had a moral opposition to eating before dawn on the grounds that I was not a nineteenth-century Russian peasant fortifying myself for a day in the fields.

Imagining isn't perfect. You can't get all the way inside someone else...But imagining being someone else, or the world being something else, is the only way in. It is the machine that kills fascists.

But ultimately I do not believe that she was only matter. The rest of her must be recycled, too. I believe now that we are greater than the sum of our parts. If you take Alaska's genetic code and you add her life experiences and the relationships she had with people, and then you take the size and shape of her body, you do not get her. There is something else entirely. There is a part of her greater than the sum of her knowable parts. And that part has to go somewhere, because it cannot be destroyed

That feeling of finishedness does not come all at once, and it is not easily won, but I think once you get there it is hard to go back.