My life's been too much of a self-created vocation. And there are times when I think I've done everything in the name of defiance.

A summer rain had left the night clean and sparkling with drops of water. I leaned against the end pillar of the gallery, my head touching the soft tendrils of a jasmine which grew there in a constant battle with a wisteria, and I thought of what lay before me throughout the world and throughout time, and resolved to go about it delicately and reverently, learning that from each thing which would take me best to another.

But death we are, and death we've always been.

Nothing in all the world is so nonsensical and contradictory, save mortals, that is, who live in the grip of the superstitions of the past.

We have such a terrible, terrible misconception of science. We think it involves the definite, the precise, the known; it is a horrid series of gates to an unknown as vast of the universe; which means endless.

You make me miserable. You really do, I want you to know that. Much as I love you, much as I need you, much as I can't exist without you, you make me miserable.

Garden of Pain, I need you. What were the songs of beasts to the cries of sentient souls?