Even as my family fell apart and things were at their most hopeless, my dad and I found a lot of happiness in the wilderness - sleeping on the cold gravel and killing as many things as we could get our hands on. Even as my mom got progressively more crazy, we found a happiness, in flashes.

I don't think many kids question their surroundings. Everything seems so permanent and inevitable growing up, even chaos.

While you can't keep your heart from getting broken, you can stop breaking your own heart...once you realize the difference between what you can control and what you can't, and that it's far, far more fun to lavish all that attention on your own self-worth.

The most reliable path to glory is base brute effort.

The tough thing is how to cultivate a life where the paramecium of happiness gets a lot of chances to get out and swim and make more paramecia. That seems like an obvious universal goal for most humans.

The reason I could fit in with so many different kinds of people was that I had no self. And then the problem is, if you don't have a self, how can you be with other people? Who the hell are you with them?

There are still things out there in the universe to contemplate and spend our lives chasing.