There are times when those eyes inside your brain stare back at you.

News travels fast in places where nothing much ever happens.

We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus!

my mother, poor fish, wanting to be happy, beaten two or three times a week, telling me to be happy: "Henry, smile! why don't you ever smile?" and then she would smile, to show me how, and it was the saddest smile I ever saw

I like to change liquor stores frequently because the clerks got to know your habits if you went in night and day and bought huge quantities. I could feel them wondering why I wasn't dead yet and it made me uncomfortable. They probably weren't thinking any such thing, but then a man gets paranoid when he has 300 hangovers a year.

An early taste of death is not necessarily a bad thing.

Trouble and pain were what kept a man alive. Or trying to avoid trouble and pain. It was a full time job.