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

It's not that he lacked poetry. But his poetry was of the body, not the mind. He spoke it in the way he moved, the way he held a hammer, rowed a boat, built a fire. I, on the other hand, was like a brain in a box, a beating heart in a coal scuttle.

A piano might fall on your head, he said, but it also might not. And in the meantime you never know. Something nice might happen.

Perhaps the way to succeed is to think of life on Earth as a colossal joke, a creation of such immense stupidity that the only way to live is to laugh until you think your heart will break.

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.

Fate isn't some middle-aged man with a squint who won't recognize you if you change your clothes.

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.