To some of us, the nights are too long. To some, the days.

Scratch any fortune and you'll find blood only a generation or two back...child labor in mines or mills...Slavery. Drugs. Stock swindles. Wasting nature with clear-cuts, pollution, harvesting to extinction. Monopolies. Disease. War. Every fortune comes out of something unpleasant.

Your being born makes your parents God. You owe them your life, and they can control you. Then puberty makes you Satan, just because you want something better.

Kids, she says. When they’re little, they believe everything you tell them about the world. As a mother, you’re the world almanac and the encyclopedia and the dictionary and the Bible, all rolled up together. But after they hit some magic age, it’s just the opposite. After that, you’re either a liar or a fool or a villain.

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

You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past.

You have no idea what it is like to constantly disappoint people. You see it the moment you meet them. You see in their eyes that they expected something so entirely different, and here they are meeting you.