If you ask me, when something extraordinary shows up in your life in the middle of the night, you give it a name and make it the best home you can.

Given my own circumstances, I find that anything can turn out to belong nearly anywhere.

My life is a pitiful, mechanical thing without a past, like a little wind-up car, ready to run in any direction someone points me.

Children model the behavior of adults, on whatever scale is available to them. Ours are growing up in a nation whose most important, influential men - from presidents to the coolest film characters - solve problems by killing people. ... We have taught our children in a thousand ways, sometimes with flag-waving and sometimes with a laugh track, that the bad guy deserves to die.

The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes.

No other continent has endured such an unspeakably bizarre combination of foreign thievery and foreign goodwill.

Sometimes I still have American dreams. I mean literally. I see microwave ovens and exercise machines and grocery store shelves with 30 brands of shampoo, and I look at these things oddly, in my dream. I stand and think, "What is all this for? What is the hunger that drives this need?" I think it's fear. Codi, I hope you won't be hurt by this, but I don't think I'll ever be going back. I don't think I can.