Maybe she hated being out of control, knowing that someone or something else was dictating her fate. Because it's really not fair. A drunk driver runs a red light, and you end up dead. A guy in a movie theater coughs on you, and you catch some rare, fatal disease. You sit in class minding your own business, and there's the kid from sixth period holding a gun in his hand. Why should other people be in control? Why should someone else get to choose when you die?

Colorful characters are the odd shaped pieces that fill the holes in life's puzzle.

In the nineteenth century, The Romantics viewed Nature as benign, a glowing reflection of God's grace. Now we know better. Nature is brutal and, if it is feminine, she's not the kind of woman you can trust. Human beings may be her finest achievement yet, but when you get right down to brass tacks, we're meat. AIDS and organisms like streptococcus don't give a crap that we subdued the earth or produced a Shakespeare...

I have before suggested that a genuine blackguard is never without a pocket-handkerchief.

With riddles as black as coals, and answers as invisible as our past, I can only depend upon the crest of the rolling wave I now traversed; a romance worshiped only by the dreamer in us all, a psithurism of trust making its way through the years of our ascension to one day climb above the kaleidoscopic canopy of this mortal coil.

The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?