“Neatness was not one of the things he aimed at in life.”

“He says his aim is poetry. One does not aim at poetry with pistols. At poets, perhaps.”

“The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly.”

“A dog has one aim in life... to bestow his heart.”

“To be completely helpless in the face of life―powerless to do a single thing―that's what I'd always feared more than anything. It was like I'd been keeping all the edges of my life neat and clean, pretending the neatness was all that mattered, pretending life could somehow be controlled.”

“I've lived my life like a serial killer; finish with one part, strangle it and move on to the next. Life in neat little boxes is life in neat little coffins, the dead bodies of the past laid out side by side. I am discovering, now, in the late afternoon of the day, that the dead still speak.”