“Until you can ignore your circumstances, and just do as you promise,” he says, “you’ll always be controlled by the world.”

Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you

You gain power by pretending to be weak. By contrast, you make people feel so strong. You save people by letting them save you.
All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog.

Isn't a kid alive who doesn't dream about rewarding her folks, or punishing them.

What Marla loves, she says, is all the things that people love intensely and then dump an hour or a day after. The way a Christmas tree is the center of attention, then, after Christmas you see those dead Christmas trees with the tinsel still on them, dumped alongside the highway. You see those trees and think of road kill animals or sex crime victims wearing their underwear inside out and bound with black electrical tape.

When you're an addict, you can go without feeling anything except drunk or stoned or hungry. Still, when you compare this to other feelings, to sadness, anger, fear, worry, despair, and depression, well, an addiction no longer looks so bad. It looks like a very viable option.

This is insomnia. All night, your thoughts are on the air.
All night long, you're thinking: Am I asleep? Have I slept?

Crying is right at hand in the smothering dark, closed inside someone else, when you see how everything you can ever accomplish will end up as trash.

The truth is, even if you read to your wife and child some night. You read them a lullaby. And the next morning, you wake up but your family doesn't. You lie in bed, still curled against your wife. She's still warm but not breathing. Your daughter's not crying. The house is already hectic with traffic and talk radio and steam pounding through the pipes inside the wall. The truth is, you can forget even that day for the moment it takes to make a perfect knot in your tie.

We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heros or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are.
Letting our past decide our future.
Or we can decide for ourselves.

How torture is torture and humiliation is humiliation only when you choose to suffer.

The charm of traveling is everywhere I go, tiny life. I go to the hotel, tiny soap, tiny shampoos, single-serving butter, tiny mouthwash and a single-use toothbrush. Fold into the standard airplane seat. You're a giant. The problem is your shoulders are too big.

Without access to true chaos, we'll never have true peace.

“My generation, all of our making fun of things isn't making the world any better.” she says. “We've spent so much time judging what other people created that we've created very, very little of our own.”

“The same mistakes we made as cavemen,” says Mr. Whittier, “we still make.” So maybe we’re supposed to fight and hate and torture each other...

We always do this, Mr. Whittier says. For the same reason our children’s children’s children’s children will always have war and famine and disease. Because we love our pain. We love our drama. But we will never, ever admit that.