“The drive downtown is an experience unto itself. You're controlled by this dark energy that's about to take you to a place where you know you don't belong at this stage in your life. You get on the 101 freeway and it's night and it's cool outside. It's a pretty drive, and your heart is racing, your blood is flowing through your veins, an it's kind of dangerous, because the people dealing are cut-throat, and there are cops everywhere. It's not your neck of the woods anymore, now you're coming from a nice house in the hills, driving a convertible Camaro.”

“I walk to my car without looking back, and as I drive away, I'm hit with a sudden wave of sadness. But it's a distant kind of sad - like when you look at your Barbies and realize you don't want to play with them anymore, because you're growing up and you've moved on, and in your heart you know it's time to make room for other things.”

“But I guess the nice thing about driving a car is that the physical act of driving itself occupies a good chunk of brain cells that otherwise would be giving you trouble overloading your thinking. New scenery continually erases what came before; memory is lost, shuffled, relabeled and forgotten. Gum is chewed; buttons are pushed; windows are lowered and opened. A fast moving car is the only place where you're legally allowed to not deal with your problems. It's enforced meditation and this is good.”

“I don't know the word for the feeling if there is one, but it's that feeling you get - or I hope you get it, anyway - when you realize the smallness of you, and the largeness of Everything Else. I'm not saying God necessarily. I'm saying you're outside at night and it's raining and you don't have an umbrella and you're running to get inside but then you stop and maybe you hold your hands palms up and feel the rain pound against your fingerprints and soak through your clothes and your wet hair against your neck and you realize how amazing it is while the thunder cracks.”

“They say the city gets in your blood, but that's crap. The city doesn't become part of you... you become part of it. It soaks you up bit by bit, year after year. Until you're just a tiny part of its system... Pumping through its veins, lost in its arteries.”

“What you know you can't explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.”