“They say that time is the greatest healer, but let me tell you this: there are some things that can never be healed. Sometimes you think these things are gone and can never hurt you again - like a snake in a basket - quite safe, until you take off the lid. I have taken the lid off the basket, and the snake still bites. Its fangs are long and sharp.”

“Until you've seen this trash can dream come true.You stand at the edge while people run you through.And I thank the Lord there's people out there like you.I thank the Lord there's people out there like you.”

“That's what we do: tell made-up stories to fend off the night, to put off telling the truth.”

“It's amazing the things you realize when you lose someone: you get mad at yourself for not saying the things you could've a million times, you take for granted the days spent doing nothing when you could have been with them.Anyone can be taken, at any time in our lives,but we always wait until they're gone to say the things we never had the courage to before.”

“Negative identity is a phenomenon whereby you define yourself by what you are not. This has enormous advantages, especially in terms of the hardening of psychological boundaries and the fortification of the ego: one can mobilize a great deal of energy on this basis and the new nation [the US] certainly did. . . . The downside . . . is that this way of generating an identity for yourself can never tell you who you actually are, in the affirmative sense. It leaves, in short, an emptiness at the center, such that you always have to be in opposition to something, or even at war with someone or something, in order to feel real.”

“There's little to see, but things leave an impression. It's a matter of time and repetition. As something old wears thin or out, something new wears in. The handle on the pump, the crank on the churn, the dipper floating in the bucket, the latch on the screen, the door on the privy, the fender on the stove, the knees of the pants and the seat of the chair, the handle of the brush and the lid to the pot exist in time but outside taste; they wear in more than they wear out. It can't be helped. It's neither good nor bad. It's the nature of life.”

“Good thing about bad rubbish is you can make the stench go away just by covering it up. It never comes back as long as you keep a tight lid on it.”