"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."

"All the time I'm not writing I feel like a criminal. It's horrible to feel felonious every second of the day. It's much more relaxing to actually write."

"A costume party… great… a chance for the bimbos to whore themselves out with no penalty of conscience. I found myself excruciatingly curious as to what she was going as, a sailor? No. A pilot. That would be something."

"There is a saying that when someone is struck down without warning that he 'didn't know what hit him.' It's a bit of a copout, providing the excuse that what happened wasn't the individual's fault at all. That it couldn't have been avoided and no one is to blame.Frankly, that's just a bunch of hokey horseshit."

"I know who you are and I am ready. Not that I want to go, of course, but I will come.' Those souls are always light because more of them have been put out."

"He closed the pages and stuffed them back into his jacket. Keeping his eyes cast downwards as he sipped his wine, he pulled out and lit a cigarette – almost a post-coital gesture. From The Willow Lake Group by Kelly Proudfoot."

"Each person's heart breaks in it's own way. Every cure will be different, but there are some things we all need. Before anything else, we need to feel safe."

"A very smart woman once told me that anger can feel like a life buoy, like it's the only thing keeping you afloat, but that in order to heal you have to let go."

"Life on earth evolved gradually beginning with one primitive life form – perhaps a self-replicating molecule – that lived more than 3.5 billion years ago; it then branched out over time, throwing off many new and diverse species; and the mechanism for most (but not all) of evolutionary change is natural selection."