This is how most people live: alive, but not conscious; conscious but not aware; aware, but intermittently.

That sense of happiness just out beyond my reach - I'm not sure I'd grasped that exactly, but I'd got something close to it, contentment maybe, or at least a functioning routine with regular rewards.

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

I don't find life unbearably grave. I find it almost intolerably frivolous.

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.

Life can be lived at a remove. You trade in futures, and then you trade in derivatives of futures. Banks make more money trading derivatives than they do trading actual commodities.

I don't think you ever understand your life - not till it's finished and probably not then either. The more I live the less I seem to understand.