167) I have the 'least' purpose when I am at work 'working' the hardest.
168) I have the most purpose when I am 'coming' or 'going' or just 'being' and am aware of the seconds of minutes, the sights and sounds, and the other, and my own relation to the other, and the sight I might be to the other.
169) My own body rewards my purpose by releasing the smallest amount of serotonin or endorphin or adrenaline when I live purposefully. Similarly when what I am doing does not matter, I am numb, effective, efficient, and the time goes by quickly. I then have a higher propensity to observe and an ability to live.
170) Interestingly, the train forces equality among the people. As a group we zoom past homeless camps and the graffiti. The artists' newest question to the train riders, is simply: We?
As a kid, growing up in the Bronx, D'Amato starved himself for days, the better to withstand the pain when someone tried to take food from him. He used to watch funeral processions outside his building and say, "The sooner death the better." One day another kid slammed him in the head with a stick, and he lost the vision in his left eye. D'Amato, however, believed in the regeneration of optic tissue, and throughout his life he made an effort to heal himself, closing his good eye so as to "force" the left eye to see once more. When he became a trainer, D'Amato told his fighters that security, financial and otherwise, would be the death of them. Security dulled the senses, and pleasure -- pleasure was worse. "The more pleasures you get out of living," D'Amato said, "the more fear you have of dying."
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"No matter what anyone says, no matter the excuse or explanation, whatever a person does in the end is what he intended to do all along."
"You can't want too many things. The beginning of corruption is wanting things. You want a car or a fancy house or a piano, and the next thing you know, you're doing things you didn't want to do, just to get the things. I guess maybe that's why I never got married. It wasn't that I don't like women. They're nice. It's nice. It's that women want things, and if I want the woman, then I have to want the things she wants. Hey, I don't want a new refrigerator, or a big TV, or a new couch."
"I believe nature's a lot smarter than anyone thinks. During the course of a man's life he develops a lot of pleasures and people he cares about. Then nature takes them away one by one. It's her way of preparing you for death."