A room full of words that are nearly the truth but not quite, each note fluttering off the steam of its rose like a broken butterfly wing.

You don't reach points in life at which everything is sorted out for us. I believe in endings that should suggest our stories always continue.

Who knows? Maybe they’re right. Maybe we are driven crazy by our feelings. Maybe love is a disease, and we would be better off without it. But we have chosen a different road. And in the end that is the point of escaping the cure: We are free to choose. We are even free to choose the wrong thing.

Stupid how the mind will try to distract itself.

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.

It's like a razor blade edging its way through my organs, shredding me, all I can think is: It will kill me, it will kill me, it will kill me. And I don't care.

When he speaks again, I can tell that he's smiling. "So I guess we saved each other.