I thought it would be such a sick joke to have to remain to be alive for decades and not believe in or feel anything.

believe that you've had most of your important memories by the time you're thirty. After that, memory becomes water overflowing into an already full cup. New experiences just don't register in the same way or with the same impact. I could be shooting heroin with the Princess of Wales, naked in a crashing jet, and the experience still couldn't compare to the time the cops chased us after we threw the Taylors' patio furniture into their pool in eleventh grade.

Make your goals big and broad enough so that they never become answered prayers and boomerang to curse you.

Time ticks by; we grow older. Before we know it, too much time has passed and we've missed the chance to have had other people hurt us. To a younger me this sounded like luck; to an older me this sounds like a quiet tragedy.

Florida isn't so much a place where one goes to reinvent oneself, as it is a place where one goes if one no longer wished to be found.

Do you remember that old TV series, Get Smart? Do you remember at the beginning where Maxwell Smart is walking down the secret corridor and there are all of those doors that open sideways, and upside down and gateways and stuff? I think that everyone keeps a whole bunch of doors just like this between themselves and the world. But when you're in love, all of your doors are open, and all of their doors are open. And you roller-skate down your halls together.

Unhappiness is something we are never taught about; we are taught to expect happiness, but never a Plan B to use to use when the happiness doesn't arrive.