That's what opium does to suffering: makes it of hypothetical interest only.

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.

I am driven by a greater force than I can resist. I believe that force has its own reason and its own morality even if they may never be clear to me while I am alive

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.

He wrote one more paragraph for his own sake, to see what he had to say.

The physical shock took away the pain of being.

If you have only one life, you cant altogether ignore the question: are you enjoying it?