Narrative becomes the way you make sense of chaos. That's how you focus the world. It's the only reason you should ever try this writing job.

The world according to Bubba is simple - if it aggravates you, stop it. By whatever means necessary.

The best thing that can happen to people entering creative professions is the dwindling of all other possibilities.

And often the worst thing wasn't the victims--they were dead, after all, and beyond any more pain. The worst thing was those who loved them and survived them. Often the walking dead from now on, shell-shocked, hearts ruptured, stumbling through the remainder of their lives without anything left inside of them but blood and organs, impervious to pain, having learned nothing except that the worst things did, in fact, sometimes happen. (Mystic River)

There are threads in our lives. You pull one, and everything else gets affected.

I believe in God. Maybe not the Catholic God or even the Christian one because I have a hard time seeing any God as elitist. I also have a hard time believing that anything that created rain forests and oceans and an infinite universe would, in the same process, create something as unnatural as humanity in its own image. I believe in God, but not as a he or she or an it, but as something that defines my ability to conceptualize within the rather paltry frames of reference I have on hand.

And he hated himself and hated her,too, for the ruin they'd made of each other.