“As the components of your life are stripped away, after all the ambitions and hopes vaporize, you reach a self-reflective starkness-- the repetitious plucking of a single overwound string.”

“Nowadays the standards had plummeted so far that I failed even at being a failure. I silently packed up. Nothing else was left. They had even robbed me of self-pity”

“Finally life becomes a very specific thing--and that's what we are. Ultimately, looking back, I'm beginning to believe that we need to always be fucked up. We need to always have some reason to hate ourselves, something to make us feel eternally incomplete.”

“Stressful jobs, loveless marriages, bad food-most people kill themselves slowly every day.”

“The masses-I love em-they rush for red lights, risking everything to capture a few seconds, only to get home and waste their lives.”

“Some of the more industrious ones were washing the windshields of cars that had been trapped by the red light. I used to see them from inside cars and think they brought it on themselves, and they probably did but now it didn't make a difference. I went over to the fire and warmed my hands with the group. I looked at their faces: idiots, criminals, retards, schizophrenics, paranoids, rejects, fuck-ups, broken-down failures. Alone, once children, never asked to be put on this earth, they ended up as jurors. Their lives were the verdict: the system, the man, something had failed.”

“Starke, release me or I’ll kick you in the balls.”And that would hurt, given the current rock-hard state of that area.”