But when a man has once broken through the paper walls of everyday circumstance, those unsubstantial walls that hold so many of us securely prisoned from the cradle to the grave, he has made a discovery. If the world does not please you, you can change it. Determine to alter it at any price, and you can change it altogether. You may change it to something sinister and angry, to something appalling, but it may be you will change it to something brighter, something more agreeable, and at the worst something much more interesting. There is only one sort of man who is absolutely to blame for his own misery, and that is the man who finds life dull and dreary. There are no circumstances in the world that determined action cannot alter, unless perhaps they are the walls of a prison cell, and even those will dissolve and change, I am told, into the infirmary compartment at any rate, for the man who can fast with resolution. I give these things as facts and information, and with no moral intimations.

“You ain’t change much, is you boy?” said Big Nail.

C.K. leaned forward over his glass and seemed to consider it very seriously.
“Well, I don’t know, they’s some people say I ain’t – then they’s others say I just a little faster than I used to be, that’s all.”

“Now I wonder jest what do they mean by that, these people tellin’ you you so much faster than you use to be.”

“Oh they didn’t say ‘so much faster,’ they jest say ‘a little faster’ – because I was always pretty fast… you may recall.”