Why does a person even get up in the morning? You have breakfast, you floss your teeth so you'll have healthy gums in your old age, and then you get in your car and drive down I-10 and die. Life is so stupid I can't stand it.

I'm never going to tell the reader what to believe; I'm going to examine these characters that believe different ways, and examine their motives.

Recall that whatever lofty things you might accomplish today, you will do them only because you first ate something that grew out of the dirt.

I wonder that religion can live or die on the strength of a faint, stirring breeze. The scent trail shifts, causing the predator to miss the pounce. One god draws in the breath of life and rises; another god expires.

That's how it is: some people are content to wait till you ask, while others jump right in with the whole story.

A human being can be good or bad or right or wrong, maybe. But how can you say a person is illegal? You just can't. That's all there is to it.

A person could spend most of a lifetime in retrospective terror, thinking of all the things one nearly didn't do.