Justice wields an erratic sword, grants mercy to fortunate few. Yet if man doesn't fight for her, 'tis chaos he's left to.

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 never the act itself but our own understanding of it that defeated us, over and over again.

Life was a freight train barreling toward just one stop, our loved ones streaking past our windows in blurs of color and light. There was no holding on to any of it, and no slowing it down.

Like that lightning that comes out of the blue when there's not even a storm going on, just a crazy crack in the sky. With something like that right in front of you, you can't help but feel there's new possibilities out there.

Making love to Aurelia was like rummaging through a card catalog in a deserted library, searching for one very obscure, little-read entry on Hungarian poetry.

In America, people of a certain age ask, 'Where were you when Kennedy was shot?' In my house you were more likely to be asked, 'Where were you when you first read 'The Catcher In The Rye?