Finally, I decided that the proper strategy was to stare back. Boys do not have a monopoly on the Staring Business.

At some point, you just pull off the Band-Aid, and it hurts, but then it's over and you're relieved.

That's why those tapes we made are going to be so great one day, because they'll tell stories that time has swallowed up or distorted or whatever.

Some people have lives; some people have music.

He'd fought hard, Lida told me, as if there was another way to fight.

Traveling, I am finding, teaches you a lot of things about yourself. For instance, I never thought myself to be the kind of person who pees into a mostly empty bottle of Bluefin energy drink while driving through South Carolina at seventy-seven miles per hour - but in face I am that kind of person.

By saying you don’t care if the world falls apart, in some small way you’re saying you want it to stay together, on your own terms.