“BAD PEOPLEA man told me once that all the bad peopleWere needed. Maybe not all, but your fingernailsYou need; they are really claws, and we knowClaws. The sharks—what about them?They make other fish swim faster. The hard-faced menIn black coats who chase you for hoursIn dreams—that’s the only way to get youTo the shore. Sometimes those hard womenWho abandon you get you to say, “You.”A lazy part of us is like a tumbleweed.It doesn’t move on its own. Sometimes it takesA lot of Depression to get tumbleweeds moving.Then they blow across three or four States.This man told me that things work together.Bad handwriting sometimes leads to new ideas;And a careless god—who refuses to let peopleEat from the Tree of Knowledge—can leadTo books, and eventually to us. We writePoems with lies in them, but they help a little.”

“A lazy part of us is like a tumbleweed.It doesn’t move on its own. Sometimes it takesA lot of Depression to get tumbleweeds moving.”

“There are bad things in the world. There's no getting away from that. But that doesn't mean nothing can be done about them. You can't abandon life just because it's scary, and just because sometimes you get hurt. ”

“That’s one thing about us Americans, right? We want everything tied up perfectly, no loose ends. We want all the answers and logical reasons for everything.... We demand a happy ending and for shit to make sense. Well, let me tell you something. It ain’t like that. Sometimes you don’t get to find out why. Sometimes shit doesn’t belong to you.”

“Moral #1: "If you work hard, stay focused, and never give up, you will eventually get what you want in life."Moral #2: Sometimes the things we want most in life are the things that will kill us.”

“You love me,” he said. “That’s all I need to know.” “You always say the right thing,” Savannah told him, her eyes so filled with love that he almost wept. “Sometimes it takes you awhile to get to it, but you always get there, and what you say is always worth waiting for.”