“There is no neatness in any life- great or small. It is only an illusion men foolishly pursue. All lived lives are a mess.The neatness in my life had begun to crumble some time before, but now it disintegrated completely as I vanished into a world of endlessly opening doors, teasing riddles and lives without boundaries.For the first time I began to understand how shallow neatness is. How cramping, how limiting.For the first time I understood neat lives are comatose lives. (the Alchemy of Desire 304)”

“I've lived my life like a serial killer; finish with one part, strangle it and move on to the next. Life in neat little boxes is life in neat little coffins, the dead bodies of the past laid out side by side. I am discovering, now, in the late afternoon of the day, that the dead still speak.”

“Just once I want it to be easy and neat. But no, there is never a good decision. I pick what I can live with.”

“I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people who live by the philosophies of popular songs.”

“For as long as we can remember,” [Griff] said, “I mean literally our whole conscious lives, time has been neatly divided into semesters and years. Each year completely distinguishable and unique. First grade, third grade. We didn’t measure by age, we measured by grade. Like I know I broke my arm in sixth grade but I’d have to do the math to figure out what year that was, or how old I was.”

“Men who pursue a multitude of women fit neatly into two categories. Some seek their own subjective and unchanging dream of a woman in all women. Others are prompted by a desire to possess the endless variety of the objective female in the world.”