“Truth is singular and lies are plural, but history - the facts of what happened is both immutable and mostly unknowable.”

“Most of my stories are not nice ones, their heroic aspects dimmed by the fact that the hand which struck me was my own. Truly ennobling narratives describe a person overcoming the bad hand that fate has dealt him, not someone like me, who takes good cards and sets them on fire.”

“We tell ourselves that we lie to protect others, but the self usually comes out looking damn good in the process.”

“End-stage addiction is mostly about waiting for the police, or someone, to come and bury you in your shame.”

“[C]ivilians are equally bewildering to the addict. I've watched people drink a glass and a half of wine and push away the rest. What exactly is the point of that?”

“In the Ebbinghaus curve, or forgetting curve, R stands for memory retention, s is the relative strength of memory and t is time. The power of a memory can be built through repetition, but it is the memory we are recalling when we speak, not the event. And stories are annealed in the telling, edited by turns each time they are recalled...People remember what they can live with more often than how they lived.”

“...that explains everything and excuses nothing.”