I thought, briefly, that I would never feel as intensely connected to the world, to another human being, as I did at that moment.

You know, you spend your whole life feeling like you don't quite fit in anywhere. And then you walk into a room one day, whether it's at university or an office or some kind of club, and you just go, 'Ah. There they are.' And suddenly you feel at home.

There are normal hours, and then there are invalid hours, where time stalls and slips, where life---real life---seems to exist at one remove.

Everything takes time... and that's something that your generation find it a lot harder to adjust to. You have all grown up expecting things to go your way almost instantaneously. You all expect to live the lives you chose. Especially a successful young man like yourself. But it takes time.

"You cut yourself off from all sorts of experiences because you tell yourself you are 'not that sort of person'" "But, I’m not." "How do you know? You’ve done nothing, been nowhere. How do you have the faintest idea what kind of person you are?"

They began to tune up, and suddenly the auditorium was filled with a single sound - the most alive, three-dimensional thing I had ever heard. It made the hairs on my skin stand up, my breath catch in my throat....I felt the music like a physical thing; it didn't just sit in my ears, it flowed through me, around me, made my senses vibrate. It made my skin prickle and my palms dampen...It was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard.

Just hold on. Just for a minute." "Are you all right ?" I found my gaze dropping towards his chair, afraid some part of him was pinched, or trapped, that I had got something wrong. "I'm fine. I just...I don't want to go in just yet. I just want to sit and not have to think about...I just...want to be a man who has been to a concert with a girl in a red dress. Just for a few minutes more.