She had all the best things wrong with her—incest, insanity, drug addiction, bulimia, alopecia: you name it. All the perfect stuff for a memoir. She’s so lucky.

I actually grew fond of her in a nastily superior kind of way. For she was so completely artless and optimistic and clueless, she didn't care that she smelled bad or was fat or wore clothes unlike everyone else's, she had some weird disconnect with life that kept her constantly bubbling, and you knew she would go blithely through her long horribly boring life thinking every thing was just swell (the opposite of me).

I thought the best thing to do would be nothing, and in that way things couldn’t get any worse.

I think that’s what scares me: the randomness of everything. That the people who could be important to you might just pass you by. Or you pass them by.

I often feel like I want to think something but I can't find the language that coincides with the thoughts, so it remains felt, not thought. Sometimes I feel like I'm thinking in Swedish without knowing Swedish.

People who have only good experiences aren't very interesting. They may be content, and happy after a fashion, but they aren't very deep. It may seem a misfortune now, and it makes things difficult, but well--it's easy to feel all the happy, simple stuff. Not that happiness is necessarily simple. But I don't think you're going to have a life like that, and I think you'll be the better for it. The difficult thing is to not be overwhelmed by the bad patches. You must not let them defeat you. You must see them as a gift--a cruel gift, but a gift nonetheless.

Are you okay?' she asked me. Of course,' I said. 'Why wouldn't I be okay?' There are lots of reasons why you might not be okay.' There are lots of reasons why anyone might not be okay,' I said.