"People all over the world telling their one dramatic story and how their life has turned into getting over this one event. Now their lives are more about the past than their future."

"The truth is I was addicted to being beautiful, and that's not something you just walk away from. Being addicted to all that attention, I had to quit cold turkey."

"I wanted to give up the idea I had any control. Shake things up. To be saved by chaos. To see if I could cope, I wanted to force myself to grow again. To explode my comfort zone."

"You see, I can handle the baby food and the not talking and being homeless and invisible, but I have to know that I can love somebody. Completely and totally, permanently and without hope of reward, just as an act of will, I will love somebody."

"Your handwriting. The way you walk. Which china pattern you choose. It's all giving you away. Everything you do shows your hand. Everything is a self-portrait. Everything is a diary."

"Leave this island before you can't."

"If you're not drunk and half naked by this point, you're not paying attention."

"“... you people with your ex-wives and stepchildren, your blended families and failed marriages, you’ve ruined your world and now you want to ruin mine...”"

"Dear sweet Peter. Can you feel this?"

"Today is the longest day of the year-but anymore, everyday is. The weather today is increasing concern followed by fullblown dread. The man calling from Long Beach, he says his bathroom is missing."

"What you don't understand you can make mean anything."

"There is nothing special in the world. Nothing magic. Just physics."

"Grace says, "We all die." She says, "The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.""

"It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace."

"Leonardo's Mona Lisa is just a thousand thousand smears of paint. Michelangelo's David is just a million hits with a hammer. We're all of us a million bits put together the right way."

"If emotion can create a physical action, then duplicating the physical action can re-create the emotion."

"The paradox of being a professional artist. How we spend our lives trying to express ourselves well, but we have nothing to tell. We want creativity to be a system of cause and effect."

"You can’t put up with anything less than lovely. You spend your life running, avoiding, escaping. That quest for something pretty. A cheat. A cliché."

"And the more she could imagine this island, the less she liked the real world. The more she could imagine the people, the less she liked any real people. [...] It got until she didn’t belong anywhere. It got so nobody was good enough, refined enough, real enough. [...] Nothing was as real as her imagined world."

""Just for the record, the weather today is partly suspicious with chances of betrayal.”"

"An artists job is to make order out of chaos. You collect details, look for a pattern, and organize. You make sense out of senseless facts. You puzzle together bits of everything. You shuffle and reorganize. Collage. Montage. Assemble."

"The weather today is increasing concern followed by full-blown dread."

"Now, smile—if you still can."

"Stendhal syndrome, Angel says, is a medical term. It's when a painting, or any form of art, is so beautiful it overwhelms the viewer. It's a form of shock. When Stendhal toured the Church of Santa Croce in Florence in 1817, he reported almost fainting from joy. People feel rapid heart palpitations. They get dizzy. Looking at great art makes you forget your own name, forget even where you're at. It can bring on depression and physical exhaustion. Amnesia. Panic. Heart attack. Collapse."

"If you're a little confused right now, relax. Don't worry. All you need to know is this is your face. This is what you think you know best."

""Let’s look in the mirror. Really look at your face. Look at your eyes, your mouth."

"You have endless ways you can commit suicide without 'dying' dying."

"Everyone's in their own personal coma."

"Because you believed in her so much more than she did. You expected more from her than she did from herself."

"After you know about biology, you don't have to be used by it."

"When a normal person, some normal innocent person who sure as hell deserved a lot better, when she comes home from waiting tables all day and finds her husband suffocated in the family car, his bladder leaking, and she screams, this is simply her orbicularis stretched to the very limit."

"When you pull up your upper lip----when you show that one top tooth, the one the museum guard broke----this is your levator labii superioris muscle at work. Your sneer muscle. Let's pretend you smell some old stale urine. Imagine your husband's just killed himself in your family car. Imagine you have to go out and sponge his piss out of the driver's seat."

"Your skin comes in three basic layers. What you can touch is the stratum corneum, a layer of flat, dead skin cells pushed up by the new cells under them. What you feel, that greasy feeling, is your acid mantle, the coating of oil and sweat that protects you from germs and fungus. Under that is your dermis. Below the dermis is a layer of fat. Below the fat are the muscles of your face"

"The official name for your liver spots is hyperpigmented lentigines. The official anatomy word for a wrinkle is rhytide. Those creases in the top half of your face, the rhytides plowed across your forehead and around your eyes, this is dynamic wrinkling, also called hyperfunctional facial lines, caused by the movement of underlying muscles. Most wrinkles in the lower half of the face are tatic rhytides, caused by sun and gravity."

"We were here. We are here. We will always be here. And we've failed again."

"If you're here, then you've failed again."

"What she learned is what she always learns. Plato was right. We are all of us immortal. We couldn't die if we wanted to."

"All the effort in the world won't matter if you're not inspired."

"Just for the record, the weather today is calm and sunny, but the air is full of bullshit."

"It's pathetic how we can't live with the things we can't understand. How we need everything labeled and explained and deconstructed."

"The deluded little rube who thought he could ever earn enough, know enough, own enough, run fast enough, hide well enough. Fuck enough."

"What I want is to be needed. What I need is to be indispensable to somebody. Who I need is somebody that will eat up all my free time, my ego, my attention. Somebody addicted to me. A mutual addiction."

"The past, the future, life on other planets, everything is such a projection of life as we know it."

"The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because it's only intangibles, ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That’s the only lasting thing you can create."

"When you're an addict, you can go without feeling anything except drunk or stoned or hungry. Still, when you compare this to other feelings, to sadness, anger, fear, worry, despair, and depression, well, an addiction no longer looks so bad. It looks like a very viable option."

"People had been working for so many years to make the world a safe organized place. Nobody realized how boring it would become."