Your skin is prickly from fatigue and pain and there is a hissing in your ears. Time passes and the pills are taking hold like a glowing white planet coming into view. A reverse eclipse. And you watch with your eyes closed. The white planet is half exposed, it grips your heart in its light and seems to be pulling you forward and now you feel that you are falling. You are awake but dreaming. "The earth is not beautiful but the universe is," you say.

Luck was something you either earned or invented through strength of character. You had to come by it honestly; you could not trick or bluff your way into it.

I thought, When a man is properly drunk it is as though he is an a room by himself--there is a physical, impenetrable separation between him and his fellows.

Where is your mother, Charlie asked. Dead. I’m sorry to hear that Thank you. But she was always dead.

It is true, I thought. I am living a life.

We can all of us be hurt, and no one is exclusively safe from worry and sadness.

It is hard to find a friend,' I said. 'It is the hardest thing in this world,' he agreed.