I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.

There is a certain clinical satisfaction in seeing just how bad things can get.

It was my first big chance, but here I was, sitting back and letting it run through my fingers like so much water.

I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me.

I can't think logically about who I am or where I am going. I have been very ecstatic, horribly depressed, shocked, elated, enlightened, and enervated.

When I was nineteen, pureness was the great issue. Instead of the world being divided up into Catholics and Protestants or Republicans and Democrats or white men and black men or even men and women, I saw the world divided into people who had slept with somebody and people who hadn’t, and this seemed the only really significant difference between one person and another.

If the body is a temple, then tattoos are its stained glass windows.