“The truth is I'm in a place without a bright side or a one best thing. I'm in a place where, honest to God, you feel you can kill your friends just by asking the names of stars.”

“I said we aren’t here to fucking like Vietnamese things, we’re here to kill or be killed by them, and telling me to wander around looking for bright sides and good things is like telling me to hurry up and get dead.”

“Because I wasn’t anything anymore. Not anythingI love or know or care about. Because thou shalt not kill, Kade. Thou shalt not kill. With all my heart I believed this. And I killed. So what am I now? And why should I live? How am I even alive? Because if this is what our lives are--if doing this to others before they do it to us is all our lives are--we’re already dead. Honest to God I feel it, Kade. I’m dead. The hell with me.”

“Fiction writing feels more honest to me.”

“Everybody gets jolted. You, me, before we die we’ll all get nailed, lots of times. But that doesn’t mean we’ll get turned into witches. You can’t avoid getting zapped, but you can avoid passing the mean energy on. That’s the interesting thing about witches, the challenge of them-- learning not to hit back, or hit somebody else, when they zap you. You can bury the zap, for instance, like the gods buried the Titans in the center of the earth. Or you can be like a river when a forest fire hits it--phshhhhhhhhhhhh! Just drown it, drown all the heat and let it wash away.”

“Words in books can remind us of truth, and help awaken us to it. But in themselves, words are just paint and writers are just painters . . . Let us not overestimate the power of any form of literature.”

“The bad thing about falling into pieces is that it hurts. The good thing about it is that once you're lying there in shards you've got nothing left to protect, and so have no reason not to be honest”