Surely there was nothing more pathetic than screwing up your own suicide.

Forests in the day are friendly places. They remind you of Sunday walks, swooshing leaves, holding a parent's big, warm hand, or providing that hand yourself. At night the woods take the gloves off and remind you why you're nervous in the dark. Night forests say "Go find a cave, monkey-boy, this place is not for you."

Time is a lake, getting deeper year by year, drop by drop. Surface tension, the electric presence of our staccato acts, keeps us scuttling like water bugs on its surface, unmindful of the depths we traverse. We're safe, afloat in the now, until we stop moving and begin to sink into the past. Only then do we realize how important all those yesterdays were, how they hold each present moment to the sun; and how many people we leave behind, stricken in time like ambered insects.

Murder is not some fictional conceit, imagined for the purpose of entertainment, but actually happens: and afterwards no credits roll, and life has to continue to be lived even if you have absolutely no idea where the deeds to the house are kept, or who services the lawn mower.

San Francisco is a pleasant enough place but, frankly, it has too many hills.

Sleep is lovely. Death is better still. Not to have been born is of course the miracle.

Dreams last as long as you let them ... both good and bad.

Terrorism isn't James Bond or Tom Clancy. Even al-Quaeda is looking old school these days--now it's just some guy with a bomb. He walks the same roads as us. He thinks the same thoughts. But he's got a bomb.

There has been no war without atrocity. War is atrocity, pure and simple: only greed, nationalism and faith help us pretend otherwise.

There's no point in wives doing pole-dancing. The whole fucking point of pole dancers is they're not your fucking wife.

Your computer is a backup of your soul, a multi-layered, menu-driven representation of who you are, who you care about, and how you sin.

The past was another country and one which the movement of time's tectonic plates pulled further away every year.

Every attack kills the innocent. Every counterattack does the same. We cower in the center of a circle of spite, not knowing which way to turn. Killers of all denominations and faiths and eras stand around the edges of our world, firing inward. They see only the people on the opposite side of the circle, their chosen foes, the demonized others. The rest of us are invisible to them.

You can't stop being afraid just by pretending everything that scares you isn't there.

You could live in a city, be one of its inhabitants, without comprehending or being part of its wider picture. Like mice living in a human house--it was their address, but that didn't mean they had rights, that they had to be viewed with anything more than benign amusement, that they weren't fair game for cats or traps.

Death is real. Death changes things. Everything else is filler, merely a message from our sponsor.

Hell is being alive, and being alive is all there is.

Death's gang is bigger and tougher than anyone else's. Always has been and always will be. Death's the man.

The assumption is always that we're so much more capable than the rest of the world. They don't win matches, we sometimes drop the ball. Wrong. Sometimes the bad guys win because they're as good as we are. Strength of will and purity of hate will make up a huge technological gap. To believe otherwise is to be a country still stuck on Spring Break, goggle-eyed with the contents of our culture's wet T-shirts, the first heart-stopping whupping of our life just visible on the horizon.

I don't believe ... that history repeats itself. There is no cycle. History is permanently doing the same thing. Sometimes we don't notice what's going on, that's all--and sometimes we have no choice but to see.

I don't know what it is with the mad, but they've certainly got force of will. Maybe it's not having the checks and balances the rest of us have, or perhaps I'm kidding myself: maybe their minds are simply clearer, unclouded with the anxieties and morality that the rest of us are swaddled with. Perhaps they have the courage to point their magical thinking at the stars.

I realized then why we respond to the sound of the waves, and the falling of rain, and wind in the trees. Because they are meaningless. They are nothing to do with us. They are outside our control. They remind us of a time, very early in our lives, when we did not understand the noises around us but simply accepted them in our ears; and so they provide blessed relief from our continual needy attempts to change our world in magic deed or endless thought.