The general feeling that his body was held together with paper clips and safety pins and would tear apart at the slightest strain.

They fuck you up. They don't mean to, but they do.

My hatred for my father, and my love for drugs, are the most important relationships in my life

The way other people felt about love, he felt about heroin, and he felt about love the way other people felt about heroin: that it was a dangerous and incomprehensible waste of time.

Whenever she thought of what she was meant to say, it seemed to dash around the corner, and lose itself in the crowd of things she could not say.

People never remember happiness with the care that they lavish on preserving every detail of their suffering.

She felt a combination of boredom and rebelliousness which reminded her of adolescence.

How can you separate who we are from who we think we are?

The compulsion to repeat what one has experienced is like gravity, and it takes special equipment to break away from it.

...how nearly inevitable it is for those who have been terrified to become terrifying once they have the opportunity.

No pain is to small if it hurts, but any pain is too small if it's cherished.

We came to the city because we wished to live haphazardly, to reach only for the least realistic of our desires, and to see if we could not learn what our failures had to teach, and not, when we came to live, discover that we had never died. We wanted to dig deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to be overworked and reduced to our last wit.

Now he regretted things even as they were happening or even before - knowing that they would happen, because he lacked the will to stop himself.

If he could just have one more day when nothing was wrong, when time could be wasted, because there had still been so, so much of it out there.

But after all this time he didn't know what he wanted to do. Let her go? Keep her close? Somehow do both things at once. Be free, and haunted, forever. If only he could keep her inside a box, safely stashed away in a closet drawer, to be taken out only when he wanted.

The seas are full of forgotten monsters, yes, but they're full of forgotten glories too. And the people who stay home and sit out the war never get to see them. That's what I think, anyway.

Like old wood, we splintered apart at the slightest touch, until we were nothing but slivers stuck in each other's fingertips.

Illness cared nothing about money or fairness or the things you planned to do later.

We hated them; we wanted them to love us. We wanted to be them; we wanted to never, ever become them.

Suicide is akin to jumping from the top roof of a burning skyscraper - it's not that you are unafraid of jumping, but the fall is the lesser of two terrors.