If there's no game, isn't winning a pretty meaningless concept?

Bleeding ulcers run in my family, we give them to each other.

When you can’t do something truly useful, you tend to vent the pent up energy in something useless but available, like snappy dressing.

I don’t duel, boy. I kill as a soldier kills, which is as a butcher kills, as quickly, efficiently, and with as least risk to myself as I can arrange.

As the week wore on, Ivan contemplated the merits of inertia as a problem-solving technique with growing favor

It’s important that someone celebrate our existence," she objected amiably. "People are the only mirror we have to see ourselves in. The domain of all meaning. All virtue, all evil, are contained only in people. There is none in the universe at large. Solitary confinement is a punishment in every human culture.

Don't wish to be normal. Wish to be yourself. To the hilt. Find out what you're best at, and develop it, and hopscotch your weaknesses. Wish to be great at whatever you are.