Growing up and growing old. Playing. Exploring. Like Pooh and Piglet. And then like the Famous Five. And then like Heidi and Anne of Green Gables. And then like Pandora, opening the great big box of the world and not being afraid, not even caring whether what’s inside is good or bad. Because it’s both. Everything is always both. But you have to open it to find that out.

In olden times, it meant the long dark of winter was finally over, and things would start growing again and the world would be renewed. The solstice was the promise–that the days wouldn’t just keep on getting shorter until they disappeared altogether. The equinox was the day when the promise was fulfilled.

I killed that boy, Parks. If you turn my life into an equation, the number that comes out is a minus one. That's my lifetime score, you understand me? And you... you and Caldwell, and Private Ginger fucking Rogers... my God, whether it means anything or not, I will die my own self before I let you take me down to minus two.

They walk on endlessly. Time elongates, fractures, rewinds and replays in stuttering moments that - while they have no coherent internal logic - all seem drearily familiar and inevitable.

He'd stopped cutting when he went to university because he'd become afraid that he would never be able to form a relationship with another human being that was as meaningful as the one he had with his own skin and the blood that flowed underneath it.

No amount of expertly choreographed PR could prevail, in the end, against Armageddon. It strolled over the barricades and took its pleasure.

But the future is uncertain, and he can't get up enough enthusiasm even to masurbate.

One to untie me, the other to point the gun at me. That’s how many it takes.

Nothing goes on forever. If it did, there wouldn't be anything else, would there?

Anything you can do, I can do better.