…how monstrous the people you loved could be.

What you tend to find in the personal lives of brilliant men is devastation akin to a nuclear bomb going off.

If I scribbled a few words on a cocktail napkin and showed it to my family, they'd proclaim it astonishing and more culturally relevant than the Bible.

What, really, was the difference between something hounding you and something leading you somewhere?

His characters are ravaged, beaten. They walk through infernos and emerged charred doves.

Most people ended up, after only a couple of months, so far away from where they'd intended to go, stuck in some barbed underbrush of a quagmire when they'd meant to head straight to the ocean.

It was what accidental deaths did to people, made everybody's sea floor irregular and uneven, causing tidal currents to collide, surge upward, thereby resulting in small yet volatile eddies churning at everybody's surface. (In the more dangerous cases, it created a lasting whirlpool in which the strongest swimmers could drown.)