Or maybe I'd do what I always do - hang out and see what develops. Fatalist to the core.

We were supposed to grow old together, Dolores. Have kids. Take walks under old trees. I wanted to watch the lines etch themselves into your flesh and know when each and every one of them appeared. Die together.

He wondered if this was what clinical depression felt like, a total numbness, a weary lack of hope.

What's your name?" "Emma Gould," she said. "What's yours?" "Wanted." "By all the girls or just the law?

You've learned that every good lie is threaded with truth and every accepted truth leaks lies.

Happiness doesn't lie in conspicuous consumption and the relentless amassing of useless crap. Happiness lies in the person sitting beside you and your ability to talk to them. Happiness is clear-headed human interaction and empathy. Happiness is home. And home is not a house-home is a mythological conceit. It is a state of mind. A place of communion and unconditional love. It is where, when you cross its threshold, you finally feel at peace.

But I often think we talk way too much in this society, that we consider verbalization a panacea that it very often is not, and that we turn a blind eye to the sort of morbid self-absorption that becomes a predictable by-product of it.