When I was supposed to be awake, I was asleep. When I was supposed to sleep, I was silent. When a pleasure offered itself to me, I avoided it.

My family had a lot of characteristics - achievements, ambitions, talents, expectations - that all seemed to be recessive in me.

Insanity comes in two basic varieties: slow and fast. I'm not talking about onset or duration. I mean the quality of the insanity, the day-to-day business of being nuts.

Not everything has a happy ending, and not everything has an ending. Some things just kind of dribble away or cut off abruptly.

Are you crazy? It's a common phrase, I know. But it means something particular to me: the tunnels, the security screens, the plastic forks, the shimmering, ever-shifting borderline that like all boundaries beckons and asks to be crossed. I do not want to cross it again.

In the parallel universe the laws of physics are suspended. What goes up does not necessarily come down, a body at rest does not tend to stay at rest and not every action can be counted on to provoke an equal and opposite reaction. Time, 'too, is different. It may run in circles, flow backward, skip about from now to then. The very arrangement of molecules is fluid: Tables can be clocks, faces, flowers.

All my integrity seemed to lie in saying No.