"All my life I've heard people speak of finding themselves in acute pain, bankrupt in spirit and body, but I have never understood what they meant. To lose. To hate. To have lost. I believed these visitations of darkness lasted only a few minutes or hours and that these saddened people, in between outs, were occupied, as we all were, with the useful purpose of happiness. But happiness is not what I thought. Happiness is the lucky pane of glass you carry in your head, but it takes all of your cunning just to hang on to it, and once it's smashed you have to move into a different sort of life."(p. 1)

"Anyone can be charming. It's really a cheap trick, mere charm, so astonishingly easy to perform, screwing up your face into sunbeams and spewing them forth. The calculated life of the wrist, chin up, thumb...