"I can become someone else, not out of pressure and desperation, but merely because a new life sounds fun or interesting or joyful."

"Hope is something really tough and tenacious you have to give up. It’s an addiction to break."

"If the living are haunted by the dead, then the dead are haunted by their own mistakes."

"It’s stunning how having nothing to lose will build your self-confidence."

"Honestly, I give up on giving up. I’m just not cut out to be some hopeless, disillusioned wretch with no aspirations for the rest of eternity, sprawled catatonic in my own feces on a cold stone floor."

"In dying—worse than flunking a grade in school, or getting arrested, or knocking up some prom date—perhaps we’ve majorly, irreversibly fucked up."

"There it is, again—that nagging tendency to hope. My addiction."

"For both genders, adolescence occurs as a kind of Ice Age of Dumbness."

"In Hell you’d be foolish to count on people displaying high standards of honesty. The same goes for earth."