The facts of his existence are plain. I know that he will never silence those unspeakable voices. He heard how people killed, and how they died and their voices infected him, coursed through his body, poisoned him. He didn't know how to turn off the noise, or turn the hate back out onto the world like the rest of us. He turned it on himself. You could see that from the scars on him.

Staying alive was what we did to pass the time.

Life is absolutely horrific, leading up to absolute horror.

I felt a momentary urge to leap into the sea and swim free of the present.

And after awhile of this my brain and my body and every single inch of me that was alive was flooded with the feeling that I was starving, starving for Edmond. And what a coincidence, that was the feeling I loved best in the world.

It's a strange sensation to live inside another person's life, to wonder all the time what he is doing, or thinking or feeling.

I didn't seem to have that effect on anyone but it would have been a waste for both of us to be saints.