“Born down in a dead man's town,
The first kick I took was when I hit the ground.
You end up like a dog that's been beat too much,
Till you spend half your life just covering up.”

“Secret to what?"
"Secret to shutting you up," he said. "I just have to beat you till you're half-dead, then give you chicken soup and"--he raised his hands--"blessed silence.”

“When you hit a wall – of your own imagined limitations – just kick it in.”

“Get up, go and be like him as much as one alive can be like the dead—without dying. Conceive him, yet be your death, too, almost. Like him be now, but only till the shadow of his end falls on the shadow of your being.”

“You can't spend the rest of your life tiptoeing around to try and avert disaster. It won't work. You'll just end up missing the life you have.”

“I think it's possible to realize you love someone as deeply as you know how to love and not end up spending the rest of your life with him.”

“Men are like dogs," Stacy was fond of saying. And she usually went on to add that, like dogs, they all took up too much space on the bed, and they always went for the crotch.”

“They'll kick you when you're up and knock you when you're down.”

“Try not to use two actions. Like when kicking, Wing Chun doesn't like to lift the knee first and then kick because this is a two step action. Also the line of force is wrong because your kick will not have ground support. Instead, your kick will transmit back to your body to off-balance you. This is why Yip Man's kick in the second set looks a bit funny at first. We want to travel in a straight line from the ground to the target, not lift the knee first.”

“I guess that’s my biggest fear for this band. I worry that if it stops, it’s going to break down and end up in the junkyard. You can hear it with some bands, man, and you can tell when they haven’t been playing together because they’re too busy resting on their laurels. Most of the time, those bands are the ones that end up losing it.”