Whoever was stupid was beneath worry or thought; you did not have to figure them out. This eliminated hundreds of people. In this life you had time only for a certain amount of thinking, and there was no need to waste any of it on people who were not threatening.

For memory is a moral action, a choice. You can choose to remember. You can choose not.

What you call your personality, you know? --it's not like actual bones, or teeth, something solid. It's more like a flame. A flame can be upright, and a flame can flicker in the wind, a flame can be extinguished so there's no sign of it, like it had never been.

Is there any mystery like who you finally turn out to be.

Boxing is about being hit rather more than it is about hitting, just as it is about feeling pain, if not devastating psychological paralysis, more than it is about winning.

When you give up struggle, there's a kind of love.

I could never take the idea of religion very seriously.