“Stuff happens when you are a kid, it scars you inside for life.”

“He said you couldn't pretend the terrible things in life didn't happen. You can't clean it up. You keep all the refuse and the scars. It's how you learn. And try to make improvements.”

“When I was a kid, we watched the Vietnam War on the six o'clock news, and it was desensitizing. You felt you were watching a war film; meanwhile you were really watching these guys getting blown to bits. Parents need to protect their kids from watching that stuff.”

“I liked you better when you were this timid little kid. What happened?”
“I started living with you guys.”
“Oh, right.”

“A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh.
It is easy to display a wound, the proud scars of combat. It is hard to show a pimple.”

“Do stupid stuff and even stupider suff will happen to you.”

“You think about all that stuff that can happen to you, he said. There aint no end to it.”

“But I'd felt as if I'd pissed my life away in the same way that you can piss money away. I'd had a life, full of kids and wives and jobs and all the usual stuff, and I'd somehow managed to mislay it. No, you see, that's not right. I knew where my life was, just as you know where the money goes when you piss it away. I hadn't mislaid it at all. I'd spent it.”

“I was of the “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade, then wonder why life didn’t give you freaking sugar so you could drink the stuff” school of thought.”

“… he said, with sort of a little derisive smile, "How can you walk down the street with all this stuff going on inside you?" I said, "I don't know how you can walk down the street with nothing going on inside you.”