I'm a grenade and at some point I'm going to blow up and I would like to minimize the casualties, okay?

Scared isn't a good excuse. Scared is the excuse everyone has always used.

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

If I had cared about her as I should have, as I thought I did, how could I have let her go?

I'm sitting her thinking, -God, I swear I will take a vow of silence and move to a monastery and worship you for all my days if you just this once provide me with an invisibility cloak, come on, come on, please please invisibility cloak now now now-. It's very possible that Jane is thinking the same thing, I have no idea, because she's not talking either, and I can't look at her on account of how I'm blinded by embarrassment.

But monotony doesn't make for painlessness.

Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.