“Some people simply REFUSE to be happy. If they were stuck in a tunnel you can show them the way out and give them a light, but they will just sit there complaining about how they got there. They are more willing to fight to STAY there instead of fighting to coming out. Okay it happened. Now what? Stop focusing so hard on how you got there, focus on how you're going to get out! Keep it moving!”

“Yes, you live with your feet in the mud and there's no time to be thinking about how you got in or how you're going to get out.”

“How'd you get the burn?"Ignoring him only got me a barrage of chatter."Yeah, how?"'Did something, or someone, do it?""You're bleeding.""It's her knee again.""She opened it up.""Did you fall?""You've got grass in your hair.""Were you in a fight?""How'd you get grass in your hair?""I think she was in a fight.""Leaves and some dirt, too. And...is that a feather?""You were in a fight with a bird?""Hey, how did you manage to knock Blake down?""She didn't knock me down! I caught her.""Hah! A little girl took you out.""Shut up or I'll take you out.""Her extreme velocity overcame Blake's superior mass.""I am superior.""How'd you get moving so fast?"I stopped abruptly and turned on them, arms gesturing wildly. "Shut up!”

“Of course a lot of guys were ashamed. Somebody said let's go out and fight for liberty and so they went out and got killed without ever once thinking of liberty. And what kind of liberty were they fighting for anyway? How much liberty and whose kind of liberty? Were they fighting for the liberty of eating free ice cream cones all their lives or for the liberty of robbing anybody they pleased whenever they wanted to or what? You tell a man he can't rob and you take away some of his liberty. You've got to. What the hell does liberty mean anyhow? It's a word like house or table or any other word. Only it's a special kind of word. A guy says house and he can point to a house to prove it. But a guy says come on let's fight for liberty and he can't show you liberty. He can't prove the thing he's talking about so how in the hell can he be telling you to fight for it? No sir anybody who went out and got into the front line trenches to fight for liberty was a goddamn fool and the guy who got him there was a liar.”

“People forgot; it was in the nature of people to forget, to blur boundaries, to retell stories to come out the way they wanted them to come out, to remember things as how they ought to be instead of how they were.”

“I know a few things about ghosts. The only way to stop them getting inside you is to spend every second of the day thinking about something else. Fighting like that makes you tired, and it doesn't matter how hard you fight anyway. They chip till they make a crack, and before you know it there's a ghost squatter in your living room. It's hard to get them out. Hard because they settle in. Hard because you like the company.”