I had never been with a woman for longer than a night, and they had always been whores. And while throughout each of these speedy encounters I tried to maintain a friendliness with the women, I knew in my heart it was false, and afterward always felt remote and caved in. I had in the last year or so given up whores entirely, thinking it best to go without rather than pantomime human closeness.

I had never been with a woman for longer than a night, and they had always been whores. And while throughout each of these speedy encounters I tried to maintain a friendliness with the women, I knew in my heart it was false, and afterward always felt remote and caved in. I had in the last year or so given up whores entirely, thinking it best to go without rather than pantomime human closeness.

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 saw my bulky person in the windows of the passing storefronts and wondered, when will that man there find himself to be loved?

Our blood is the same, we just use it differently.

I lay in the dark thinking about the difficulties of family, how crazy and crooked the stories of a bloodline can be.

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.