There are also several notes in your file suggesting that you are a world-class smartass.” “Really? You mean I made it through the nationals?” “And you apparently think you’re hilarious.” “You’re saying I’m not?

There are such moments in a life. Solitary seconds on which the reality of what life means pivots and turns from a dead end toward a road of untrodden grass that stretches on forever.

It’s refreshing to be insane. Just as it’s liberating to be aware of it.

He could laugh, though, and there was no bluesman who ever lived who didn’t know how to laugh at the craziness of life.

And to Conrad, it seemed as though he had entered some strange world beyond our own, where nothing was as it appears, and anything could be possible.

Life is truly weird... And it’s not getting any less weird the farther I get from home.

There are moments that define a person’s whole life. Moments in which everything they are and everything they may possibly become balance on a single decision. Life and death, hope and despair, victory and failure teeter precariously on the decision made at that moment. These are moments ungoverned by happenstance, untroubled by luck. These are the moments in which a person earns the right to live, or not.

He’d never much cared for the need to believe one people were better than another. One on one, most of them seemed all right. It was only when you gathered any of them in groups they tended to be stupid.

Everyone carries around his own monsters. – Richard Pryor.

Shooting a pistol while running with any accuracy at all is next to impossible. They train us at the Academy to do it at a walk. Slow yourself down, focus on the target. Be relentless, but be accurate. Nobody ever won a gunfight by missing what they were aiming at.