"I shuffle along, letting the current pull me, and I have the sense that I am like a rat caught in a maze of tunnels, moving endlessly toward some promise of...Of what? Light? Life? Cheese?"

"During the Japanese invasion, bombs had fallen from the sky and people could run for cover. Now, they exploded in the middle of the road, or in the fields while people were playing soccer."

"The older I get, the more I see there are these crevices in life where things fall in and you just can't reach them to pull them back out. So you can sit next to them and weep or you can get up and move forward. You have to stop worrying about who's not here and start worrying about who is."

"In my civilian world at home in Los Angeles, half the people I know are on antidepressants or anti–panic attack drugs because they can’t handle the stress of a mean boss or a crowd at the 7-Eleven when buying a Slurpee."

"I remember when my aunt died, the thing that pissed me off the most was going to get groceries the next day and seeing all those people who didn't care... Didn't understand why I was so upset when I saw her brand of cigarettes behind the counter."

"I sing to use the waiting, My bonnet but to tie, And shut the door unto my house; No more to do have I, Till, his best step approaching, We journey to the day, And tell each other how we sang To keep the dark away."

"I have more enemies than I deserve,' I said. 'I am fighting a losing battle, me against the world. The next century is at stake. Time is running out and my optimism is sorely strained.'Yeah?' he said. 'I was young once too."

"I know that I'm going to die and that you're going to die. I can't do anything about that. But I can explore it through a metaphor and make a kind of funny, dark story about it, and in doing so, really exhaust and research as many aspects of it as I can imagine. And in a way, that does give me some closure."