“There are days when solitude, for someone my age, is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall.”

“My practicality consists in this: in the knowledge that if you beat your head against the wall it is your head which breaks and not the wall … that is my strength, my only strength.”

“I will tell you the secret to getting rich on Wall Street. You try to be greedy when others are fearful. And you try to be fearful when others are greedy.”

“When you hear me singing
you get the rifle down
and the flashlight, aiming for my brain,
but you always miss and when you set out the poison
I piss on it
to warn the others.”

“When someone asks you, A penny for your thoughts, and you put your two cents in, what happens to the other penny?”

“Not everything is about beating your head against the wall until it breaks.”
“Just most things.”

“The Divine Energy is listening to us when we speak to other people, but also when we are still and silent and able to accept solitude as a blessing.”

“Tell me how you crumble when you hit the wall, the place you cannot go beyond by the strength of your own will. What carries you to the other side of that wall, to the fragile beauty of your own humanness?”

“When someone dies, it feels like the hole in your gum when a tooth falls out. You can chew, you can eat, you
have plenty of other teeth, but your tongue keeps going back to that empty place, where all the nerves are still a little raw.”

“What's the point in wasting a perfectly good brick wall when you have someone to throw against it, that's what I always say.”