There are always far better things ahead than what we will leave behind.

I'm always so glad," Sylvie murmured, "that I don't have to take a turn at being other people.

So Mr. Pizarsky had been a poet? That was how he’d said it: “I was a poet." As if the poet had died. He was hiding, perhaps.

Look, I've got more personalities than I can use already. All you are is one too many.

Weird? Absurd? That’s how it seemed to me. I had these forces, these compunctions, these alternative personalities inside me, driving me. It was like being a jack-in-the-box and I was unsure which personality was going to jump out next: Billy, who thought of himself as a cowboy or a terrorist; Kato the cutter; anorexic Shirley, whose only self-indulgence was binge drinking and the occasional salad sandwich. I didn’t dislike Shirley. I was afraid of her. Shirley knew things I didn’t.

Religion, so far as it is genuine, is in essence the response of created personalities to the Creating Personality, God.

By the time Cheryl Hersha came to the facility, knowledge of multiple personality was so complete that doctors understood how the mind separated into distinct ego states, each unaware of the other. First, the person traumatized had to be both extremely intelligent and under the age of seven, two conditions not yet understood though remaining consistent as factors. The trauma was almost always of a sexual nature… (p52)

Why didn't God apportion fine looks in equal accordance with deserving personalities? A horrid man ought to be horrid looking.

How come every squitty little shitty snotty bastard knows my name?

We live alone in our cluttered psyches, possessed by our entrenched beliefs, our fatuous desires, our endless contradictions - and like it or not we have to put up with this in one another.