You're so young... Are you sure that's what you want your life to be, forever and ever? That job? That career? That girlfriend?

I suppose most people would think that it was wonderful, that the world is so varied, that there is something for everyone, and I don't know why I felt so closed and bitter and threatened by things I did not like.

Sometimes I envy religious people for the comfort of believing. It would make everything so much easier.

The first night Stephen and I slept together, he whispered numbers into my ear: long, high numbers -- distances between planets, seconds in a life. He spoke as if they were poetry, and they became poetry. Later, when he fell asleep, I leaned over him and watched, trying to picture a mathematician's dreams. I concluded that Stephen must dream in abstract, cool designs like Mondrian paintings.

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.

Dr. Adler had instructed me to always say whatever I was thinking, but this was difficult for me, for the act of thinking and the act of articulating those thoughts were not synchronous to me, or even necessarily consecutive. I knew that I thought and spoke in the same language and that theoretically there should be no reason why I could not express my thoughts as they occurred or soon thereafter, but the language in which I thought and the language in which I spoke, though both English, often seemed divided by a gap that could not be simultaneously, or even retrospectively, bridged.

One man’s nonsense is another man’s sense.