“I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of sceneryair, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy.”

“What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security, and, What a man is is an arrow into the future and a what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.”

“But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defensless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jump...”

“I saw the years of my life spaced along a road in the form of telephone poles threaded together by wires. I counted one, two, three... nineteen telephone poles, and then the wires dangled into spac...”

“There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.”

“So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about as numb as a slave in a totalitarian state.”

“The world is come upon me, I used to keep it a long way off, But now I have been run over and I am in the hands of the hospital staff.”

“If you have a strong stomachread on.”

“At the end of the second week they were still working and Arretapec, Conway and their patient were being talked, whistled, cheeped and grunted about in every language in use at the hospital.”

“July 24, 6:03 A.M.The laundry was warm and the rafters were firm, and Michael Holzapfel jumped from the chair as if it were a cliff...Michael Holzapfel knew what he was doing. He killed himself for...”

“A book is a suicide postponed.”

“How much can you really trust the promise of a suicidal father?”