Her husband was lazy, she said, and he was a liar. What’s worse than a lazy liar? Nothing.

-141

There will always be a few details that can’t be explained, and people can end up in jail, and one of those people might be you. But not if this man kills himself. If he kills himself voluntarily, there is no killer to indict. The only perfect homicide is a legitimate suicide.

-143

Why waste time with politeness? It wasn’t like we were going to rekindle our friendship. I didn’t recognize the person in front of me and I had no desire to pursue a fresh relationship with a new person who simply happened to resemble the old person I’d already lost touch with once before.

-155

She asked how the wolf had been killed. He said he had used the traditional method: He covered a sharpened knife in pig’s blood, placed the knife in his freezer, and allowed the blood to freeze into ice. The frozen blade was then doused with another coating of pig’s blood and frozen again. He repeated this process forty times, until the knife had become a crimson pork popsicle. A final coat of fresh blood was applied to the surface of the ice, just before he positioned the blade upright on the forest floor. A wolf, smelling fresh blood, discovered the camouflaged knife and commenced licking its savory frozen coating. Over time, the wold stripped away the ice and exposed the blade, but the ice had numbed the animal’s tongue. The wolf did not realize the knife was now slicing into his anesthetized mouth; instead, the wolf tasted his own warm blood and licked even harder. This continued until the wold, weakened by his actions and condition by his desire, slowly bled out.

-182

You miss your old friends when you don’t see them, but you miss them more when you do.

-195

“You should be happy to have this problem,” he kept telling himself, as if it were possible to change your feelings by criticizing your conscience.

-200

Never played sports. Never been in a fight. Never depressed. Never exactly correct.

-206

You have to lose your entire life in order to understand how worthless most of life is. You have to lose ita ll, all at once. That’s the only way to gauge the value of anything.

-212

The machinations of male insecurity are hard to explain. It was like being in a long-distance relationship with a beautiful woman I didn’t deserve. I constantly needed to check-in. I constantly had to convince myself that nothing had changed.

-214

The only way to appreciate the present is to pretend it’s already the past. Emotions must live in the future.

-220