“Call me Bitter Otter. It’s just a nickname I gave myself. However, a better descriptive and more realistic name for myself would be Tangy Walrus.”

“It’s funny, Matt, everyone thinks Roman’s a nickname--but it’s not, it's just my name. We've got military names way back in our clan. I've got Great-Granddad Grant and Great Uncle Sherman and Uncle MacArthur and Cousin Audie and Cousin Achilles. No," he mused, "Roman's not a nickname. A nickname would be–oh, I don’t know, something like ... Caesar or something! The mighty Roman! ~ Roman Meister, nickname-loving manager of the San Carlos Coyotes in The Mighty Roman, broadly hinting for a nickname of his own.”

“I forced myself to stay put and keep looking - impatient assholes would make a leap, letting adrenaline and desperation guide them, but I was fucking ancient and I knew better. It was bitter, but I fucking knew better about just about everything.”

“I didn’t want to tell the story of myself, but someone I called myself. If you read yourself as fiction, it’s rather more liberating than reading yourself as fact.”

“I look at myself but I'm missing. I know myself: it’s not me.”

“Men wanted me. They all did, however briefly, but none of them wanted to keep me. That's what I needed. I needed to be owned, loved. BUT NOT BY A MAN. I knew then that I never needed to be kept by a man. What I needed was to love myself, to want to keep myself around. And in that revelation, I knew that if I wanted to keep myself, that a man wanting to keep me would just be a by-product.”