An observerer can't tell if a person is silent and still because inner life has stalled or because inner life is transfixingly busy.

People ask, how did you get in there? What they really want to know is if they are likely to end up there as well. I can't answer the realt question. All I can tell them, it's easy.

And it is easy to slip into an parallel universe. There are so many of them: worlds of the insane, the criminal, the cripled, the dying, perhaps the dead as well. These worlds exist alongside this world and resemble it, but are not in it.

Lunatics are similar to designated hitters. Often an entire family is crazy, but since an entire family can't go into the hospital, one person is designated as crazy and goes inside.

[...] I failed biology. I was surprised to be failing it, because I loved it; [...] My favorite part was gene-recession charts. I liked working out the sequence of blue eyes and brown eyes in families that had no characteristics except blue eyes and brown eyes. My family had a lot of characteristics - achievementm ambitions, talents, expectations - that all seemed to be recessive in me.