After you find out all the things that can go wrong, your life becomes less about living and more about waiting.

The truth is, immigrants tend to be more American than people born here.

Why do I do anything?' she says. 'I'm educated enough to talk myself out of any plan. To deconstruct any fantasy. Explain away any goal. I'm so smart I can negate any dream.

By the time you're thirty, your worst enemy is yourself.

He ran as fast as he could, but the memories were fast too. He stumbled upon them and fell to the ground. The memories got up and stared into his eyes menacingly, they laughed harder and kept their foot on his neck. He choked and fought to breathe. He tried and failed to scream. They choked him hard until he suffered and died miserably inside.

To Mr. Jones, she said, imagine you're looking up at a blue sky, and imagine a tiny airplane skywriting the letter Z. Then let the wind erase the letter. Then imagine the plane writing the letter Y. Let the wind erase it. Then the letter X. Erase it. Then the letter W. Let the wind erase it.

We've taken the world apart but we have no idea what to do with the pieces.

It's pathetic how we can't live with the things we don't understand. How we need everything labeled and explained and deconstructed. Even if it's for sure unexplainable. Even God.

A culture of vultures steeped and born of violence shall choke on the blood of its offspring.

Whenever you get an appetite, you feed yourself. Therefore, fill your belly on wisdom of things old and new. Only swallow the truth, less you choke on the lies.

Freedom can choke you if you don't know how to handle it.

In the middle of the mayhem, you came and sang a song of melancholy. You promised a wildfire, but instead choked the light that was struggling hard for survival. Eventually when all the light went off. You left, complaining about the darkness.

She kept forcing herself to remember the entire conversation, playing it back and playing it back, all the way through, forcing a finger down her memory's throat.

Humiliation is humiliation only when you choose to suffer.

Men of profound sadness betray themselves when they are happy: they have a mode of seizing upon happiness as though they would choke and strangle it, out of jealousy--ah, they know only too well that it will flee from them!