Don't Panic! Female, 32, Engaged. Roma, Italy

"... the bass is massive, invasive; the bass knocks loudly and then just pushes like floodwater into our brains and then is everywhere, forcing out all thinking; it brings ten suitcases and sets up in the master bedroom; it rearranges the furniture; the bass vibrates through our heads, adding a sound track to synapses, to everything stored there, to remembered phone numbers and childhood memories."

"I asked Toph to make her something. He had been making a series of Jesus figurines from colored bakeable clay - Jesus in a tuxedo and cane, mouth open ("Showtunes Jesus"), Jesus with a blond wig and pink woman's suit ("Hillary Jesus"), and Jesus in a white sleeping bag with a red cross atop it ("Sleepover Jesus") complete with a tiny can of itching powder."

"- And we will be ready, at the end of every day will be ready, will not say no to anything, will try to stay awake while everyone is sleeping, will not sleep, will make the shoes with the elves, will breathe deeply all the time, breathe in all the air full of glass and nails and blood, will breathe it and drink it, so rich, so when it comes we will not be angry, will be content, tired enough to go, gratefulli, will shake hands with everyone, bye, bye, and then pack a bag, some snacks, and go to the volcano-"

"Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell, and when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough."

"I do not believe in races. I do not believe in governements. I see life as one life at one time, so many millions simultaneously, all over the earth. Babies who have not yet been taught to speak any language are the only race of the earth, the race of man: all the rest is pretense, what we call civilization, hatred, fear, desire for strenght.... But a baby is a baby."

"'Can something be created in language independently of the people who use the language? Can language become a self-replicating system or...' I'm drunk, I suddenly realise, so I shut up. But I do wonder for a moment about this idea, that something could emerge within language - an accident, or mistake, perhaps - and the users of that language would then have to dal with the consequences of this new word being part of their system of signification."

"'It's not whether something is cursed that's important,' he says. 'You have to find out why it is cursed, and what the curse is.'"

"Sometimes I wake up with such an immense sense of disappointment that I can hardly breathe. Usually nothing has obviously triggered it and I put it down to some combination of an unhappy childhood and bad dreams."

"When I was a kid I always made an agreement with myself never to identify with main protagonists, because bad things or, more troublingly, big things tended to happen to them and I couldn't cope with the feeling that these things were also happening to me, to the self that you project into fiction when you read. So I would decide on a secondary character that I would 'be' for the duration of the book. Sometimes I died; sometimes I urned to be evil. But I never had to take centre stage."

"Went into the office and played Doom for an hour. Deleted some e-mail.
Morris from Word is in Amsterdam so I asked him to try out the vegetarian burger at a McDonald's there."

"I think that Starbucks has patented a new configuration of the water molecule, like in a Kurt Vonnegut novel, or something. This molecule allows their coffee to remain liquid at temperatures over 212 Farenheit. How do they get their coffee so hot? It takes hours to cool off-it's so hot it's undrinkable-and by the time it's cool, you're sick of waiting for it to cool and that "coffee moment" has passed."

"I am really terrible at remembering three-letter acronyms. It's a real dead zone in my brain. I still barely can tell you what RAM is [...] I'm realizing that three-letters acronysms are actually words now, and no longer simply acronyms: ram, rom, scuzzy, gooey, see-pee you... Words have to start somewhere."

"Well, Windows is nonintuitive... counterintuitive, sometimes. But it's so MALE to just go buy a Windows PC system and waste a bunch of time learning bogus commands and reading a thousand dialog boxes every time you want to chenge a point size or whatever... MEN are just used to sitting there, taking orders, executing needless commands, and feeling like they got such a good deal because they saved $200. WOMEN crave efficiency, elegance... the Mac lets them move within their digital universe exactly as they'd like, without cluttering up their human memory banks. I think the reason why so many women used to feel like they didn't 'understand computers' was because PCs are so brain-dead... the Macintosh is responsible for upping not only the earning potential of women but also the feeling of mastering technology, which they get told is impossible for them. I was always told that."

"Narratives (stories) traditionally come to a definite end (unlike life); that's why we like movies and literature-for that sense of closure-because they end."