Life is not a PG feel-good movie. Real life often ends badly. Literature tries to document this reality, while showing us it is still possible for us to endure nobly.

I want to believe that happiness might at least be possible later on in life for people prone to sadness.

Look, sometimes it’s OK with girls like this, they wanna have fun, and sometimes it’s not because they've got a broken wing and they’re hurt and they’re an easy target. In this case, this particular case, I think that wing is being fixed, my friend, and you gotta make sure that it’s mended and you’re getting in the way of that right now, okay, because she’s sensitive and she’s smart, she’s artistic. This is a great girl, you gotta be respectful to that. Come on, let me walk you to your car, you’re a better guy than this.

You can lose yourself in repetition—quiet your thoughts; I learned the value of this at a very young age.

Let me tell ya. You gotta pay attention to signs. When life reaches out with a moment like this it's a sin if you don't reach back... I'm telling you.

I will not be quoting Hemingway anytime soon, nor will I ever read another one of his books. And if he were still alive, I would write him a letter right now and threaten to strangle him dead with my bare hands just for being so glum. No wonder he put a gun to his head, like it says in the introductory essay.

In my arms is a woman who has given me a Skywatcher's Cloud Chart, a woman who knows all my secrets, a woman who knows just how messed up my mind is, how many pills I'm on, and yet she allows me to hold her anyway. There's something honest about all this, and I cannot imagine any other woman lying in the middle of a frozen soccer field with me - in the middle of a snowstorm even - impossibly hoping to see a single cloud break free of a nimbostratus.