If I turn up suicided in the morning, it was murder.

If you start in the pit of despair with these profane, awful things, even a glimmer of hope or awareness is going to occur that's much brighter coming from this dark, awful beginning.

I know that when a supersexy older girl with hips and breasts and nice hair wants to take off your glasses and to paint you a smoky eye she's merely trying to enroll you in a beauty contest she's already won. It's a kind of slummy, condescending gesture, like when rich people ask poor people where they summer. To me, this smacks of a blatant, insensitive "let them eat cake" type of chauvinism.

This isn't about guilt or innocence, he says. The dinosaurs weren't morally good or bad, but they're all dead.

And the more she could imagine this island, the less she liked the real world. The more she could imagine the people, the less she liked any real people.

You can say anything if enough people will listen.

Are these things really better than the things I already have? Or am I just trained to be dissatisfied with what I have now?