I'm a toxic waste byproduct of God's creation.

Look up at the stars and you're gone.

What's burning down is a re-creation of a period revival house patterned after a copy of a copy of a copy of a mock Tudor big manor house. It's a hundred generations removed from anything original, but the truth is aren't we all?

Sometimes the past seems too big for the present to hold.

I learned all those jokes in second grade. Second grade is really where they tell you those horrific jokes, racist jokes and misogynistic jokes that you have no idea what they mean, and you just memorize them because they have a very strong effect, they make people laugh in this kind of nervous, horrible way, and it's only later that you realize that you've got a head full of crap.

We thought all this teaching was to make us smart. What it did was make us stupid. With all the little facts we learned, we never had the time to think.

A hotel, he told me, was a big house where a lot of people lived and ate and slept, but no one knew each other. He said that described most families in the outside world.