By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain.

Imagination, like reality, has its limits.

Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons.

A place where your life exists before you live it, and where it goes afterwards.

He wished he could've explained some of this. How he had been braver than he ever thought possible, but how he had not been so brave as he wanted to be. The distinction was important.

you're never more alive than when you're almost dead.

With a hangover and with fear, it is difficult to put a helmet on your head.