Merely an opportunity to buy a lottery ticket. Someone would surely win millions, but millions would surely pay for it.

If something is worth dying for, then you’ve got a reason to live.

a place so ferociously patriotic I thought Agent Orange might have been manufactured there or at least named in its honor.

Movies were America’s way of softening up the rest of the world, Hollywood relentlessly assaulting the mental defenses of audiences with the hit, the smash, the spectacle, the blockbuster, and, yes, even the box office bomb. It mattered not what story these audiences watched. The point was that it was the American story they watched and loved, up u

You are a good student, as all Orientals are. Despite myself, I felt a small surge of pride. Like all good students, I yearned for nothing but approval, even from fools.

At least these cretins knew fear, one of the two great motives for belief. The

No surprise, then, that sometimes I dreamed of trying to pull a mask off my face, only to realize that the mask was my face.

Like warriors of legend, we had sworn to die for one another, snared by the romance of schoolboy friendship, united by the eternal things we saw in each other: fidelity, honesty, conviction, the willingness to stand by friends and uphold beliefs. But what did we believe in at fourteen?

After all, nothing was more American than wielding a gun and committing oneself to die for freedom and independence, unless it was wielding that gun to take away someone else’s freedom and independence.