Each step is more difficult than the last; the heaviness fills me and turns my limbs to stone. You must hurt or be hurt.

it occurs to me that there is so much I never knew about him--his past, his role in the resistance, what his life was like in the Wilds, before he came to Portland, and I feel a flash of grief so intense it almost makes me cry out: not for what I lost, but for the chances I missed.

At a certain point your brain stops to rationalize things. At a certain point it gives up, shuts off, shuts down.

There's still always the possibility that I've gone totally, clinically cuckoo. But somehow I don't think so anymore. An article I once read said that crazy people don't worry about being crazy - that's the whole problem.

People need other people to feel things for them," she said. "It gets lonely to feel things all by yourself.

I still wanted to know why. As though somebody was going to answer that for me, as though any answer would be satisfying.

It was all very strange, Mr. Gray thought, as he wiped the coffee canister clean with a sponge. Very, very mysterious. You were born; you lived a whole life; and at the end, you wound up in a coffee canister. "Ah, well," he said out loud quietly. "That's just the way things are. Life's a funny business." Death, he supposed, was the punch line.