I am the cause of all my upsets. I am my worst enemy.

If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?

You're safe because you're so trapped inside your culture. Anything you can conceive of is fine because you can conceive of it.

The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because it's only intangibles, ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die.

The short stories tend to be a journalistic gathering of anecdotes that are put together to make something larger.

To merely observe your culture without contributing to it seems very close to existing as a ghost.

Most guys will fight to know you. Some guys will deny you're a real person, and some will just ignore you." The zealot. The atheist. The agnostic.