To be heroic is to be courageous enough to die for something; to be inspirational is to be crazy enough to live a little.

Everything we do really is just a little marker on the long road to death. And sometimes that’s overwhelmingly depressing to me, and sometimes it makes me feel kinship and forgiveness. We’ve all got the same ending to the story. The way we make that story more elaborate, I got to respect.

Smiling at death seems like a pretty bold act. And so I smile like a damned fool.

Life can only be understood looking backward. It must be lived forward.

Where once we aspired to be more like our heroes, today we try to make our heroes more like us.

She was restless. She drove a little too fast, swam a little too far offshore. She hitchhiked. She skied recklessly. While Sylvia's rabid perfectionism was very real, she was far from the good-girl persona she worked so hard to cultivate.