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A beating hurts for a little while. The shame of cowardice never leaves.

Before we go forward, we have to look back.

You want people lined up, Will. You want the good guys on one side, the bad on the other. It doesn't work that way, does it? It is never that simple. Love, for example, leads to hate. I think that was what started it all. Primitive love.

She dabbed her eye. A sarcastic rejoinder came to my lips, but I bit it back.

Most were conspiracy nuts, the kind who think Elvis and Jimi Hendrix are jamming on some island off Fiji.

Yvonne started humming the QuickGo jingle, one of those torturous tunes that enters through the ear canal and proceeds to ricochet around the skull in search of an escape route it will never find.

Hope could be a wonderful thing. But hope could crush you anew every single day. Hope could be the cruelest thing in the world.

Don't tell me the sky's the limit when there are footprints on the moon!

You've made plenty of short stories long. But never, ever, have you made a long story short.

We get mad at someone for cutting us off in traffic or for taking too long to order at Starbucks or for not responding exactly as we see fit, and we have no idea that behind their facade, they may be dealing with some industrial-strength shit. Their lives may be in pieces. They may be in the midst of incalculable tragedy and turmoil, and they may be hanging on to their sanity by a thread. But we don't care. We don't see. We just keep pushing.

Memories, you see, hurt. The good ones most of all.

Summer romances come to an end. That was part of the deal. They are built like certain plants or insects, not able to survive more than one season. I thought we would be different. We were, I guess, but not in the way I thought. I truly believed that we would never let each other go. The young are so dumb.

That's the problem with falling in love. It makes you start talking like a bad country song.

Things can always be said later, but things can never be unheard.

They say you never know how someone will react when the grenade is thrown.

But life changes people. It smothers that kind of larger-than-life woman. Time quiets them down. That firecracker girl you knew in high school - where is she now? It didn't happen to men as much. Those boys often grew up to be masters of the universe. The super successful girls? They seemed to die of slow societal suffocation.

Death is so close, always, a breath away, so perhaps it was wise to introduce children to that concept at an early age.

"Semper paratus." "It's Latin," Shane said. "It means 'Always ready'."

Family and money is never a good mix. Someone is always going to feel resentful.

Doctors kept stressing that mental disease was the same as physical disease. Telling someone who was clinically depressed, for example, to shake it off and get out of the house was tantamount to telling a man with two broken legs to sprint across the room. That was all well and good in theory, but in practice, the stigma continued. Maybe, to be more charitable, it was because you could hide a mental disease.

All around her, children and families played and laughed and reveled in the glory of this seemingly ordinary day. They did so without fear or care because they didn't get it. They all played and they all laughed and they felt so damn safe. They didn't see how fragile it all was.

It was obvious and a bit of cliché, but we don't really age in a straight line. We age in a circle, curving back to childhood, but in all the wrong ways.

Here is the truth about tragedy: it's good for the soul.

Sex is for anyone; the aftermath is for lovers.

The warden threw a party in the county jail
The prison band was there and they began to wail
The band was jumping and the joint began to swing
You should've heard those knocked out jailbirds sing

Let's rock, everybody, let's rock
Everybody in the whole cell block
Was dancing to the Jailhouse Rock

I said everyone looks happy. That was kinda my point. If you judge the world by Facebook, you wonder why so many people take Prozac.

The world doesn't give even the slightest damn about us or our petty problems.

Those who believe that we are anything other than animals are blind. All humans are savages. The ones who are well fed are just lazier. They don't need to kill to get their food. So they dress up and find so-called loftier pursuits that make them believe that they are somehow above it all. Such nonsense. Savages are just hungrier. That was all. You do horrible things to survive. Anyone who believes that they are above that is delusional.

I ordered a cheeseburger and a beer from a waitress who looked as though she wanted to be in one of those want-to-get-away? commercials. She called me hon. I love when a waitress calls me hon.

Love your parents - while we are busy growing up, they are growing old.

Perception is often more important than reality.

I kept hearing that "better to have loved and lost" bullshit. Another falsehood. Trust me, it is not better. Don't show me paradise and then burn it down.

Kids don't do what their parents say - they do what they see their parents do. So who was to blame here?