Why are we even here [on earth], what's our human nature? It's precipitating a real philosophical crisis that I find quite fascinating.

Below a certain point, if you keep too quiet, people no longer see you as thoughtful or deep; they simply forget you.

I saw doves and I thought they were rocks, but they were asleep. My breath made them stir, and they rocks took flight, the earth exploding... and my only thought was that I wanted you to see them, too.

All families are psychotic. Everybody has basically the same family - it's just reconfigured slightly different from one to the next.

When you are young, you always expect that the world is going to end. And then you get older and the world still chugs along and you are forced to re-evaluate your stance on the apocalypse as well as your own relationship to time and death. You realize that the world will indeed continue, with or without you, and the pictures you see in your head. So you try to understand the pictures instead.

Nature is one great big wood-chipper. Sooner or later, everything shoots out the other end in a spray of blood, bones and hair.

...we're told by TV and Reader's Digest that a crisis will trigger massive personal change--and that those big changes will make the pain worthwhile. But from what he could see, big change almost never happens. People simply feel lost. They have no idea what to say or do or feel or think. they become messes and tend to remain messes.