For official record, announce instructor, the state requires no epic hero. No strive achieve personal celebrity of spotlight and applause. Lectures instructor, the state desires best ideal perform as mediocre. No gain attention showboat. No buffoon. Best effort so occur average. Suppress climbing ego. Become ordinary. Invisible.

Sometimes you do something, and you get screwed. Sometimes it's the things you don't do, and you get screwed.

Maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves.

And the seventh rule is if this is your first night at fight club, you have to fight.

I am the all-singing, all-dancing crap of this world.... I am the toxic waste by-product of God's creation.

In all probability the Human Genome Project will, someday, find that I carry some recessive gene for optimism, because despite all my best efforts I still can't scrape together even a couple days of hopelessness. Future scientists will call it the Pollyanna Syndrome, and if forced to guess, I'd say that mine has been a way-long case history of chasing rainbows.

The little boy smiled back at all the angry faces glaring in at him. And the little boy blew kisses.