- Ray: Once you take the cherry out of life. Once you take your wife, or your love or however....the cherry, life ain't nothin man. It ain't nothin man. You're a zero, and everything else you're doing is just fucking around.
- Nathan: I don't find myself in the common mold of interests, you know, that one would see. And, as a consequence, I see things a little differently than the other person. I don't quite see things the same way. I have a different perspective of things that I see, and that makes things difficult. I think in very simplistic terms. You wake up in the morning, you eat breakfast and you breathe in and out for the rest of the day...and at night you eat dinner, you go to bed, and perhaps you wake up the next day...if you don't croak during the meantime. Unfortunately, things have turned out not to be so simple.
- Nathan: You haven't lived until you've been in a flophouse with nothing but one lightbulb and 56 men squeezed together on cots. With everybody snoring at once, and some of those snores so deep and gross and unbelievable dark, snotty, gross subhuman wheezings from hell itself. Your mind almost breaks under those deathlike sounds and intermingling odors of hard, unwashed socks, pissed and shitted underwear. And over it all, slowly circulating air much like that emanating from uncovered garbage cans. And those bodies in the dark, fat and thin and bent some legless, armless. some mindless. And worst of all, the total absence of hope. It shrouds them and covers them totally. It's not bearable. Those men were all children once. What has happened to them? And what has happened to me? It's dark and cold out there.
- Bruce: I am in superlative aerobic condition and tremendously accustomed to the extremes of Mother Nature.