“It’s funny but true: you can much more easily bottle up an emotion when it’s hi-grade nuclear. You give awaythe little things, but with some small ingenuity, you can conceal some really fucked-up shit, especially in plainsight. If you can’t extract the elephant from the room, paint the walls grey. Just be mindful not to step oneither end of it after.”

“A secret is a rotting anchor, hidden in deep water. You drop it and convince yourself that it’s safe, tethered beyond sight. In that peculiar comfort, you forget that it binds you. And when a storm rolls in, it will not raise.”

“In New Orleans, absurdity is like the humidity. It permeates everything, until you stop noticing it. It connects everything and everyone in its oddness and the climate of convention has no place within it. That’s how it goes there. You live, breath, and feel the life that finds you. Thinking’s not required. Thinking can come later, when the weather breaks and you need some saner shelter.”

“If you let it, the shit that actually went down could put years on you but it wasn't fatal. The gut you busted to keep all the other potential shit from ever happening would always kill you though, with slow certainty. ‘Death from a thousand Coulds’, Stencek called it.”

“Bah! You are so not the romantic you led me to believe. For that, I’m going to plague you from the next life. Every time it rains, that’ll be me, trying to knock some spirituality into that thick head of yours.”

“If you take the cemeteries tour, remember that the bigger the crypt, the bigger the bastard. You need an extra leg-up to Heaven when the Devil has you by the ankle.”

“Well, I think we all started off as ash, astral ash; the Big Bang and all that. You and I - stardust. Maybe a little piece of me and a little piece of you were once companions on some great cosmic dust making its way to this rock.”