“I've told my children that when I die, to release balloons in the sky to celebrate that I graduated. For me, death is a graduation.”

“Death is the Graduation of the Soul”

“On My Eighth-Grade Graduation Ceremony “They’re celebrating you graduating from eighth grade? We just went to your sixth-grade graduation two goddamned years ago! Jesus Christ, why don’t they just throw a fucking party every time you properly wipe your ass?”

“Trapped inside a metaphor, I've often felt the need to re-describe it, to change the terms. This isn't so much a balloon, I've wanted to say, as a bubble within which I'm simultaneously exposed and sealed off.... depriving me of reality, reducing me to an abstraction....[NY, Dec. 1991; Columbia Graduate School Of Journalism Speech]”

“I was also going to give a graduation speech in Arizona this weekend. But with my accent, I was afraid they would try to deport me.”

“I failed angst in high school. They let me graduate anyway.”