Body cells replace themselves every month. Even at this very moment. Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories."

‘I’m finished as a human being,’ she said. ‘All you’re looking at is the lingering memory of what I used to be. The most important part of me, what used to be inside, died years ago, and I’m just functioning by auto-memory.’"

My head is like some ridiculous barn packed full of stuff I want to write about,” she said. “Images, scenes, snatches of words … in my mind they’re all glowing, all alive. Write! they shout at me. A great new story is about to be born - I can feel it. It’ll transport me to some brand-new place. Problem is, once I sit at my desk and put them all down on paper, I realize something vital is missing. It doesn’t crystallize - no crystals, just pebbles. And I’m not transported anywhere."

But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o’clock in the morning."

But I didn’t understand then. That I could hurt somebody so badly she would never recover. That a person can, just by living, damage another human being beyond repair."

Anyway, it seems to me that the way most people go on living (I suppose there are a few exceptions), they think that the world or life (or whatever) is this place where everything is (or is supposed to be) classically logical and consistent. Talking with my neighbors here often makes me think that. Like, when something happens, whether it’s a big event that affects the whole of society or something small and personal, people talk about it like, “Oh well, of course, that happened because such and such,” and most of the time people will agree and say, “Oh, sure, I see,” but I just don’t get it. “A is like this, so that’s why B happened.” I mean, that doesn’t explain anything.

It’s like when you put instant rice pudding mix in a bowl in the microwave and push the button, and you take the cover off when it rings, and there you’ve got rice pudding. I mean, what happens in between the time when you push the switch and when the microwave rings? You can’t tell what’s going on under the cover. Maybe the instant rice pudding first turns into macaroni cheese in the darkness when nobody’s looking and only then turns back into rice pudding. We think it’s natural to get rice pudding after we put rice pudding mix in the microwave and the bell rings, but to me that’s just a presumption. I would be kind of relieved if, every once in a while after you put rice pudding mix in the microwave and it rang and you opened the top, you got macaroni cheese. I suppose I’d be shocked, of course, but I don’t know, I think I’d be kind of relieved too. Or at least I think I wouldn’t be so upset, because that would feel, in some way, a whole lot more real.

"

The winter was a cold one, but I sometimes forgot to turn on the heat, unsure whether the cold was real or just something inside me"