Memory is the only thing that binds you to earlier selves; for the rest, you become an entirely different being every decade or so, sloughing off the old persona, renewing and moving on. You are not who you were, he told her, nor who you will be.

If not just the brain but the quirks that made the individual were composed of recycled matter only, it was hard to be sure where the edges of one such being ended and another person began.

It was entirely silent and I tried to breathe its peace.

I don't like being rumbled, I like to be invisible.

The thunder of false modesty was deafening.

Why take drugs specifically designed to send you insane?

I suppose that each of us may have a great moment in our life, a month, a week a year, when we are most fully what we are meant to be