“Mom lived in 709. Five doors down from 714, the number they stamped on Quaaludes.”

“Sometimes what I did five minutes ago scared the fuck out of me five minutes later.”

“The part of his mind that considered odds and consequences had shut down entirely, snuffed by the sheer adrenal rush of holding her, falling together into the Impala's sunken upholstery. He took her face in his hands as he kissed her, wanting to just get it right, to stamp the moment, to blunt the thunder of fear pounding in his skull as the rest of him succumbed to a sensation beyond pleasure, a kind of twisted relief that he'd macheted all his moorings, that whatever happened now would happen because he'd said 'Fuck It!' to everything that had rendered him, for more years than he could count, a soul-dead, heart-numbed misfit staggering from pill to pill just to get through the dull risk of his own existence.”

“This is what I think: If you had the nerve to live what you lived, you should have the nerve to write it.”

“Being a junkie, when you broke it down, was nothing more than a crazed day job.”

“We can't live together," I remember screeching. "We're married. It's too corny!”

“As far as I could tell, life was nothing but a forced march down a mined highway. Even if you did everything you were supposed to do, sooner of later if was your turn to step on a claymore.”