Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.

Fiction, poetry, music...these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.

The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.

Both destiny's kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person's basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can't even hear because you're in such a rush to or from something important you've tried to engineer.

I cannot say what color Lenore Beadsman’s eyes are; I cannot look at them; they are the sun to me.

My chest bumps like a dryer with shoes in it.

The job of the first eight pages is not to have the reader want to throw the book at the wall, during the first eight pages.