We all end up living secret lives. We create what we are willing to admire and admiring what we shouldn't confess to the secret ofour own sin, our own insufficiency, our own sadness. We all end up taking our secrets into the world and handing them over to strangers, only to realize it's often too late to claim them back. The very nature of time passing is sad beyond words. Memories mean they're gone.

Where there is no style, there is in effect no point of view. There is, essentially, no anger, no conviction, no self. Style is opinion, hung washing, the caliber of a bullet, teething beads.

September: it was the most beautiful of words, he’d always felt, evoking orange-flowers, swallows, and regret.

Ordinary persons, he said, smiling, found no differences between men. The artist found them all.

I hate injustice, I despise inequity, I condemn hypocrisy, I abhor the lack of reason.

The man who has faith in logic is always cuckolded by reality.

I kneel to my Lord because I am such a failure. I pray, I hope, I look to the Gospels.