“Death did this to people: making cowards, scapegoats, preachers and mourners of the living; while the dead – ignoble or not – became objects of respect for achieving something before the rest of us.”

“Yet, despite their many surgeries and jobs, most of them looked like old girls – girls who had suffered some wasting disease. These same things, breasts and botox, like independence and immodesty, had been powerful and shameful a few short years back, put in the same category as an extra toe or a stutter; they were quaint now.”

“I festered with this duality of love and ego, where ego scorns the very love its seeking and then despairs in its absence.”

“The power of "can't": The word "can't" makes strong people weak, blinds people who can see, saddens happy people, turns brave people into cowards, robs a genius of their brilliance, causes rich people to think poorly, and limits the achievements of that great person living inside us all.”

“Taro taught me that people respect spirit, but even cowards don't respect cowards.”

“He is dead and I, the self serving coward that I am, still live. Life is not fair. There is no pattern. People die at random. Something everyone knows, but no one truly believes. They think that when it comes to them there will be a lesson, a meaning, a story worth telling. That death will come to them as a dread scholar, a fell knight, a terrible emperor.Death is a bored clerk, with too many orders to fill. There is no reckoning. No profound moment. It creeps up on us from behind, and snatches us away while we shit.”

“Paradise is being able to say at that (second before our death) moment: "I made some mistakes, but I wasn't a coward. I lived life and did what I had to do.”