“Nobody lives forever, nobody stays young long enough. My past seemed like so much excess baggage, my future a series of long goodbyes, my present an empty flask, the last good drink already bitter ...”

“When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart r...”

“Stories are like snapshots, pictures snatched out of time, with clean hard edges. But this was life, and life always begins and ends in a bloody muddle, womb to tomb, just one big mess, a can of wo...”

“Despite your best efforts, people are going to be hurt when it's time for them to be hurt.”

“At the end of the day it's about how much you can bear, how much you can endure. Being together, we harm nobody; being apart, we extinguish ourselves.”

“Life is not a PG feel-good movie. Real life often ends badly. Literature tries to document this reality, while showing us it is still possible for us to endure nobly.”

“If you pray, you can endure any pain.”

“We are shaped by every endured situation.”

“There is no doubt that the most effective way to heal my pain is to purposefully put it to work healing the pain in the life of another. But that means I must endure the pain of not focusing on 'my...”

“We are just too blinded by the phrase, "grow old together" and learning its meaning from hopeless movies and novels that glorify undying love and unbelievable understanding. Don't you think? Realit...”

“The bones of the oak tree that had stood by the spring branch during my youth were scattered about the ground, pieces of the skeleton of a majestic life that had passed while I was off growing up a...”

“We live to work.Man was made to move.Without work we shall grow old quickly.”