Which is what it all comes down to, I suppose – how you’re selling. Welcome to the twenty-first century, where the only opinion of you that matters is the one that isn’t your own. Rate My Tits. Rate My Ass. Rate My Children. Rate My Essential Being. 1 Star: Awful. This Being left me feeling like I wanted more.

You can hope all you want for a happy ending, but sometimes, like it or not, the guy writing your story is working on a tragedy; you may not even be the main character.

Write something dangerous. Say something you shouldn’t. Blow something up. But well.

His intelligence only exacerbated the guilt Kugel felt for bringing him into the world. It was one thing to have condemned a child to life, that was criminal enough, but life was a sentence more easily served by fools.

I believe in a personal God; everything I do, He takes personally.

Anger and depression are not diseases or dysfunctions or anomalies; they are perfectly rational responses to the myriad avoidable disappointments that begin in a thoroughly irrational hope.

Kugel was a firm believer that death was not always a bad thing – that life often reached such levels of crapitude that dying was preferable to living.

Expecting hell, we’re ill prepared for heaven.

Written with passion, honesty, humor, and a stubborn, rebellious optimism, Dear Marcus is like nothing I’ve ever read. When a bullet in the back told Jerry McGill not to go on, Jerry went on-smiling.

What’s the harm in forgetting? What does remembering do? Kugel had read that the war in the Balkans was referred to as the War of the Grandmothers; that after 50 years of peace, it was the grandmothers who reminded their offspring to hate each other, the grandmothers who reminded them of past atrocities, of indignities long gone. Never forget! shouted the grandmothers. So their grandchildren remembered, and their grandchildren died.