“I had let my digust with teaching ruin my love of literature.”

“In Ecuador the Indian mate was too poor to buy Polaroid glasses but he saw the caudal fins of marlin long before my perfect eyes noticed anything. Benny played pool as if the cue stick emerged from his body. Not my alcohol & geometry. She was an asshole and I couldn't have loved her at gunpoint.”

“Barring love I'll take my life in large doses alone--rivers, forests, fish, grouse, mountains. Dogs.”

“Trying to teach creativity is the major hoax of our time along with the Iraq war and plastic surgery.”

“I did not want to live out my life in the strenuous effort to hold a ghost world together. It was plain as the stars that time herself moved in grand tidal sweeps rather than the tick-tocks we suffocate within, and that I must reshape myself to fully inhabit the earth rather than dawdle in the sump of my foibles.”

“Nothing on my trip thus far was as I expected which shows you that rather than simply read about the United States you have to log the journey.”

“My advice is, do not try to inhabit another's soul. You have your own.”