“..would I have had a different lifefailing this embrace with broken things,iridescent veins, ecstatic bullets, small cracksin the brain, would I know these particular facts,how a phrase scars a cheek, how waterdries love out, this, a thought as casualas any second eviscerates a breath.”

“The whole thing was the precise opposite of what I figured it would be: slow and patient and quiet and neither particularly painful nor particularly ecstatic”

“Curious the small and lesser fates that join to lead a man to this. The thousand brawls and stoven jaws, the clubbings and the broken bottles and the little knives that come from nowhere. For him perhaps it all was done in silence, or how would it sound, the shot that fired the bullet that lay already in his brain? These small enigmas of time and space and death.”

“That's the thing about human life--there is no control group, no way to ever know how any of us would have turned out if any variables had been changed.”

“That’s the thing about a human life-there’s no control group, no way to ever know how any of us would have turned out if any variables had been changed.”

“If I had no penis, how would I pee? How would I make love? How would I think?”