Joyland

When you're twenty-one, life is a roadmap. It's only when you get to be twenty-five or so that you begin to suspect that you've been looking at the map upside down, and not until you're forty are you entirely sure. By the time you're sixty, take it from me, you're fucking lost.

When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction.

It’s hard to let go. Even when what you’re holding onto is full of thorns, it’s hard to let go. Maybe especially then.

You think Okay, I get it, I'm prepared for the worst, but you hold out that small hope, see, and that's what fucks you up. That's what kills you.

All I can say is what you already know: some days are treasure. Not many, but I think in almost every life there are a few. That was one of mine, and when I'm blue -- when life comes down on me and everything looks tawdry and cheap, the way Joyland Avenue did on a rainy day -- I go back to it, if only to remind myself that life isn't always a butcher's game. Sometimes the prizes are real. Sometimes they are precious.

People think first love is sweet, and never sweeter than when that first bond snaps. You've heard a thousand pop and country songs that prove the point; some fool got his heart broke. Yet that first broken heart is always the most painful, the slowest to mend, and leaves the most visible scar. What's so sweet about that?

The last good time always comes, and when you see the darkness creeping toward you, you hold on to what was bright and good. You hold on for dear life.

My father had taught me - mostly by example - that if a man wanted to be in charge of his life, he had to be in charge of his problems.

I'm not sure anybody ever gets completely over their first love, and that still rankles. Part of me still wants to know what was wrong with me. What I was lacking.

What I know now is that gallant young men rarely get pussy. Put it on a sampler and hang it in your kitchen.

In the years since, I've discovered there's a lot to be said for boredom.

...I'd been raised by my parents to believe barfing your feelings on other people was the height of impoliteness...

Young women and young men grow up, but old women and old men just grow older and surer they've got right on their side.

We rarely get what we imagine in this world.

This is a badly broken world, full of wars and cruelty and senseless tragedy. Every human being who inhabits it is served his or her portion of unhappiness and wake up nights.

Some days are treasure. Not many but I think in almost every life there are a few.

Pops gave him a cool stare that settled Tom down - a thing not always easy to do. "Son, do you know what history is?" "Uh...stuff that happened in the past?" "Nope," he said, trying on his canvas change-belt. "History is the collective and ancestral shit of the human race, a great big and ever growing pile of crap. Right now, we're standin at the top of it, but pretty soon we'll be buried under the doodoo of generations yet to come. That's why your folks' clothes look so funny in old photographs, to name but a single example. And, as someone who's destined to buried beneath the shit of your children and grandchildren, I think you should be just a leetle more forgiving.

Climb aboard, Jonesy. I'm going to send you up where the air is rare and the view is much more than fair.

I kissed her, just a gentle brush of my lips across hers. It was like swallowing a tiny drop of something incredibly sweet.

We all write fiction when we write about the past.

God and heaven lasted about four years longer than the Tooth Fairy

He says there's a reason wife and life sound almost the same.

The gate is the key to the kingdom.