It's not fair," I said. "It's just so goddamned unfair." "The world," he said, "is not a wishgranting factory.

At some point, you gotta stop looking up at the sky, or one of these days you'll look back down and see that you floated away, too.

Talking to a drunk person was like talking to an extremely happy, severely brain-damaged three-year-old.

What matters to you defines your mattering.

I think people who are religious are more likely to want one around, but it's a very secular position.

At the end, we brought her to New York, where I was living, for a series of experimental tortures that increased the misery of her days without increasing the number of them.

Reading with an eye towards metaphor allows us to become the person we’re reading about, while reading about them. That’s why there is symbols in books and why your English teacher deserves your attention. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if the author intended the symbol to be there because the job of reading is not to understand the author’s intent. The job of reading is to use stories as a way into seeing other people as a we ourselves.