You learned to accept, or you ended up in a small room writing letters home with Crayolas.

They walked through the rainy dark like gaunt ghosts, and Garraty didn't like to look at them. They were the walking dead.

I don't have nightmares; I give them all to you.

Do you drink?" "Of course,I just said I was a writer.

Why don't we all just go crazy when we know were going to croak? Because the mind's a monkey. You put things in departments and you go ahead. You go on and plan for the future and assume that the future's going to work out okay. Yet we know that sooner or later we're all going to be eating worms, whether it's fifty years or sixty. It might be tomorrow. It might happen today.

I think we fought Vietnam for the benefits of civilization, and certainly we fought it to oppose authority. To show our authority, to show we weren't weak. Isn't that what Nixon kept saying? "We have to show the world that we're not weak." So of course what we ended up showing the world was that we were, yep, weak. 'Cause we couldn't beat these kids in black pajamas.

Pride was the belt you used to hold your pants up when you had no pants.