It gave me a strange feeling, and the rest of that night I didn’t say much, but merely sat there and drank, trying to decide if I was getting older and wiser, or just plain old.

We are turning into a nation of whimpering slaves to Fear

And that, I think, was the handle--that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting--on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark--the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

Who said anything about slicing you up? ... I just wanted to carve a little Z on your forehead-- nothing serious.

I hate pain, despite my ability to tolerate it beyond all known parameters, which is not necessarily a good thing.

Whatever he might have denied me was unimportant; it was the fact that he could deny me anything at all, even what I didn't want

Any combination of a 250-pound Mexican and LSD-25 is a potentially terminal menace for anything it can reach